Keywords:

This case study is part of a series that has been produced within the study on "Risks and Trust in pursuit of a well-functioning PID infrastructure for research" commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange in July 2021. The main outcome of this study is a report examining the current PID landscape with an emphasis on its risks and trust-related issues. This complementary series of case studies aims to provide a deeper insight into specific areas of activity, workflows and stakeholders within this wider PID landscape.

Case study

Failed PIDs and unreliable PID implementations

Rationale

PIDs serve as a building block of the scholarly infrastructure and might be described as the "glue" that holds together all the different parts of the scholarly record.

This includes scholarly outputs, digital objects, contributors, institutions etc. and PIDs aim to establish some sort of meaningful relation between these items by describing how they are related.

It is, however, important to not view PIDs in isolationrather, PIDs are one part of a larger system that might be described as a "tightly coupled system". The term tightly coupled system originates from computer architecture and describes a system, which consists of several parts all dependent upon each other. "Hardware and software components that are linked together and dependent upon each other. For example, in a multiprocessing environment, where several computers share the workload, a tightlycoupled system might have to be shut down in order to add or replace one of the machines." (McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E., 2003) In the case of the PID infrastructure, PIDs are a piece of technology (software, in this analogy) that is directly linked and dependent upon organizations (hardware) that both use and support it. The PID infrastructure is a multilateral system, which needs all parts of it to function properly.

Of course, technical failure of PIDs can occur at any time. For example, Crossref experienced several longer outages, the most recent one was a 17-hourlong outage on March 24th, 2022, due to a large data center outage (similar to the one responsible for another outage in October 2021), leaving the website, content registration system, APIs and reporting function defunct.1 However, this case study is about another risk for PID failures: What happens if organizations providing and managing PIDs are unreliable? Does the system in fact need to be shut down in order to replace one of its parts? There's also, of course, a situation that as an institution, you begin to rely at some point on certain persistent identifiers. So these systems become embedded within the systems that you work with so that the functioning of the system ultimately also depends on the rate of reliability of the persistent identifier. So, you create a degree of dependence on these systems. These examples are tightly connected to a number of social risks that were illustrated in our study. These risks are of concern, especially for PIDs that are so embedded in the scholarly communication system that they almost function as "invisible infrastructures" that may only become apparent upon breakdown. (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) The Persistent Uniform Resource Locator system (PURL) is a URI-based identification scheme that consists of a http scheme, a name authority (such as a domain name) and a path. In contrast to normal URLs, PURLs do not directly target the resource they identify, but use a resolving function (similar to other PID systems such as DOIs) that redirects to the current location of the identified object. (Hakala, 2010), However, PURLs are not fully location independent and the fact that they need a naming authority makes them acceptable as Unique Locators, but not as reliable Unique Identifiers, as described by Duerr et al. (2011).

A prominent use of PURLs can be found in Dublin Core: All DC elements are identified via PURLs. That means, all systems employing DC metadata, such as repositories, are also directly connected to PURLs. PURLs are also widely used in other digitally published ontologies for the semantic web in order to define URIs for each term without having to register new domain names for every ontology. Examples include the Human Disease Ontology2 , FaBIO, a FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology 3 , or the German GBV Ontology 4 . purl.org, as the major name authority, was founded, run and managed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) from 1995 until 2016. It was free to use and provided a low-maintenance solution, especially for assigning persistent URIs in ontologies, as noted above. According to Car et al. (2017), over 100,000 identifiers were generated. However, the system lacked social infrastructure and formal governance (Klump & Huber, 2017). Most PURLs relied on OCLCs name authority, so when OCLC withdrew institutional support in 2014, a lack of maintenance led to a slew of technical problems, which made a lot of PURL identifiers almost unusable.

The system was eventually put into "read only" mode, making it impossible for PURL owners to manage their identifiers.

At one point the administrative interface of PURL collapsed, so that it wasn't possible to mint new PURLs anymore or change the resolution of existing ones. OCLC didn't inform the users about the state of the system, so people were getting quite worried about it (...)

And then OCLC lost interest in it because it wasn't really able to compete with DOI or Handle. It was sidetracked, but not before many, many PURLs had been assigned. So it was important to keep the system alive, but at the same time OCLC didn't seem to be willing any more to invest in the system.

Even before being dropped by OCLC, trust in PURL's reliability was sometimes quite shaken, as illustrated by a Tweet by Andrew Treloar in 2011: "Persistence of object good, but persistence of cited identifier crucial. (Context? Purl.org is currently failing to resolve…)" [START_REF][END_REF] .

According to a conversation in the PURL google group from 2015, PURL actually never made it past the state of a Research & Development project at OCLC during its 18 years of existence. It basically existed as a "single machine with a single, part-time administrator" 6 . However, the discontinuation of OCLC's support nearly "killed" the whole ID system. In 2016, The Internet Archive and OCLC announced that the Internet Archive would take over the management of PURLs as a "new sustainable service" 7 , including the transfer of all previous PURL definitions and a new web interface to manage PURLs at https://purl.prod.archive.org/.

PURL is therefore still alive -even though it needed serious life support and a reanimation by the Internet Archive. But consistent problems like these do not make PURLs very trustworthy:

For example, DCMI PURLs were resolving to a wrong target 8 and the SSL certificate expired without immediate action or response by the Internet Archive 9 . Dublin Core, which is heavily dependent on PURLs as described above, seems to have kept a close eye on its reliability after the move to the Internet Archive 10 .

The question remains: what would have happened if the Internet Archive had not taken over PURL as a service? Coming back to the analogy of tightly coupled systems, the death of PURL because of organizational "hardware" failure would have led to a huge amount of problems, especially in the semantic web. Here, an organization solely responsible for an important identifier just ceased support or "lost interest", as some of the interviewees in our study have described it.

OCLC somehow got tired of it and they went over to the Internet Archive, and they're doing a poor job running it now. Which is really dramatic, because a lot of ontologies depend on PURL URIs for their terminology. You know, I mean, Dublin Core even uses PURLs. So this is basic infrastructure that somehow ... Well, we didn't lose it yet, but it's definitely not maintained at the technical level that encourages further use.

So it looks like PURL is okay at the moment but I think there is still a risk because it's not a strategic product to the Internet Archive. So if anyone is using PURLs I would advise them to move over to some PID system, because even if the collapse was avoided this time, it might not happen next time.

Unreliable PID implementations

The handle implementation of the e-LIS repository e-LIS 11 (eprints in Library and Information Science) is considered the largest Open Access repository in Library and Information Science.

According to information publicly available via the e-LIS website the operation of the repository is currently supported by the Agricultural Information Management Standards Portal (AIMS) which in turn is financed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), deplegal (a law firm specialized in legal assistance in the field of Intellectual Property, Media, Entertainment, Information Technology and Data Protection) and the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Both nature and volume of support by these stakeholders is not revealed or described on the website. It was launched in 2003 and its internal structure comprises an administrative board of three persons, an executive board with five members and an editorial board with about sixty members being responsible for the quality control of submitted items.

In Spring 2017 there were some discussions going on about e-LIS failing to keep the handle resolving or assignment alive. As one of the regional editors stated in a blog comment 12 , this was "caused by the temporary change of the used repository software". One of the effects was that handles that were already assigned to documents now referred to other documents. 13 Obviously, these complications are a consequence of the server's uncertain funding. Organizations offer hosting as sponsorship/ funding for e-LIS, which results in regular server moves -meaning also that technical decisions around e-LIS are not in the sovereignty of its community. e-LIS migrated from Eprints to Dspace between December 2010 and January 2011. 14 After e-LIS had been running under DSpace for about a year, it was decided to switch back to Eprints. Apparently, in the course of this platform change, the mapping between handles and URLs was lost. At least from spring to autumn 2022, the e-LIS handles are not functional, the server also does not use a SSL certificate. The dependence of e-LIS on hosting by external organization reveals a serious weakness: organizational and technical decisions do not lie with e-LIS. Gruyter posted via Twitter 15 that they won the "Best Publisher UX Award 2022" sponsored by OpenAthens this was harshly criticized by the user Stefan Müller (@LingMuelller) stating (directed at De Gruyter) that he "found many non-working DOIs, entire volumes are missing. The database seems to be a mess." 16 He also posted an example of an DOI (10.1515/97831101 98621.185) that did not resolve at that date (and that still doesn't as of 20th September 2022). In the discussion following this posting, Stefan Müller mentioned to have already in 2021 reported a severe problem with the DOI-resolving by a range of reputed publishers. 17

In a communication with the consultants, Stefan Müller reported that he did not investigate non-resolving DOI systematically. He simply stumbled upon many broken DOIs while editing a handbook and collecting relevant literature for seminars. 18 He provided the consultants a random sample of eight DOIs that could not be resolved Spring 2021 [START_REF]De Gruyter[END_REF] ; four of them still did not work in September 2022. [START_REF] Gruyter | Cambridge University Press This case study has mainly been written[END_REF] This issue addresses DOIs that were obviously not even registered with Crossref, so they can not be resolved to any URL.

The case of discontinued journals

We analysed data provided by Laakso, Matthias & Jahn (2021) with their publication on vanished OA journals in order to find out whether DOI records are kept up to date or curated, so they link to archived articles in the case a journal ceases to exist. From the 174 journals reported, we selected only journals that were online and published after 2015, as the analysis on journals that ceased to exist even earlier proved that these mostly did not have any PID implemented. Applying the aforementioned selection criteria and after elimination of journals for which it is no longer possible to find out whether they issued DOIs, two journals remain. For both journals obviously DOIs were registered, but after the journals ceased to exist, no contingency plan became effective, so there is no archived version online to which the DOI points. In fact, the registration agency either was not informed about the discontinuation of the journals or (lacking new locations it might direct the resolving to) simply did not change their DOI-URL-matching after the journal ceased to exist.

PIDs & lacking perceived usefulness

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) describes perceived usefulness as one of the main variables that determine the acceptance of new technologies. In the PID ecosystem, if a new identifier is not perceived as useful by the target user community, there will be a real problem of acceptance and uptake, even if the same identifier is considered as necessary by PID service providers. This may be illustrated by the failure of the ISO ISRN identifier. 30 years ago, the International Standard Report Number (ISRN) was required by major national libraries and STI centers for the processing of scientific, technical and administrative reports, especially for the production of the European SIGLE bibliographic database for grey literature.

Created in 1980, the launch and production of SIGLE was a political European decision, coordinated by the EC and organized as a network of main STI stakeholders in different EU member states, with an operating agent; among the participants of the network were CNRS-INIST (France), Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH (Germany), Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Netherlands) and The British Library Document Supply Centre (UK). The role of these institutions was the identification, collection (acquisition), cataloging, preservation and supplying of reports on a national level.

After initial funding by the EC, it was currently produced by EAGLE (European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation). Its members, major European STI libraries and centres, expressed explicitly the need of an persistent identifier for reports. "The recent proposal of an ISRN (International Standard Report Number) will make possible the bibliographic identification of reports identified on the national level." (Debachere, 1995) The structure, metadata, provision and governance are described by Stock & Schöpfel (2000). In France, INIST has been designated as the national agency responsible for assigning these numbers, while FIZ Karlsruhe became the international agency. In fact, the role of the national ISRN agencies has been the development and maintenance of a national ISRN register and the promotion of the new identifier among the report producers who had to assign themselves an ISRN to each published report, similar to the functioning of the ISBN identifier for books.

"With the implementation of the SIGLE (System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe) system (the bibliographic database for GL described below), a set of regulations for the standardisation of data to be entered in the system, was issued. This has inevitably influenced the presentation of this documentation. Among these regulations, the description of the type of registration and the related bibliographic level introduced the ISBN and ISSN codes which, if they appear on documents, are accepted by the system. The elaboration of the standard ISO 10444 'International standard technical report number (ISRN)', published in 1994 can be partly considered a realisation of the decisions made in York, even if it is based on the ANSI standard Z 39. 23-1983 (first edition:1974). The application of this standard foresees the establishment of an international agency supported by national centres for the assignment of report numbers and their control." (Alberani & De Castro, 2001) In reality, the ISRN was not perceived as useful by the report producers who should have assigned them, either as a complement or as a substitute to their own internal reference number. The uptake was extremely low; the additional workload and the new development was not considered as necessary or facilitating the internal handling or the external dissemination.

The ISRN was perceived as useful and even essential by a limited number of stakeholders for the production of one service, i.e. the SIGLE database (at that time the only large international bibliographic database for grey literature). But as the ISRN had to be assigned by the report producers and not by the national libraries and STI centres, there was immediately a problem which obviously had not been anticipated as a risk. Communication and promotion were not enough to change the situation. The issue was not awareness , but perceived usefulness.

However, the definitive failure of the ISRN identifier was determined by another factor, i.e. the decision of the same stakeholders to end the European cooperation and to stop the acquisition of grey literature including reports and the production of the SIGLE database. The reasons have been described in Schöpfel, Stock & Henrot (2006) Today, the more than 1m former SIGLE records are freely available as a dataset on the Dutch EASY data repository DOI: 10.17026/dans-xtf-47w5, without the ISRN identifier.

Issues around risk and trust

Overview

The different issues around PID implementation raised in the interviews and in desk research of our study show a great diversity both in their phenomena and causes.

On the one hand, with PURL we encountered a PID that, despite the beta status stated by its provider, was used by organizations to reference objects that are highly relevant. To some extent, this can be seen as an act of naivety on the part of users. However, it also points to the problem of setting up a service and enabling its use without having an exact idea of the purpose, seriousness, and endowment with which one intends to offer it.

Next, with e-LIS, we found a repository whose lack of funding leads to dependencies on supporting institutions, which take over the hosting of the server and thus also sovereignty over technical actions such as updates or migrations and -at least the case of e-LIS suggests this -exercise these probably with less care than with in-house services. With e-LIS this caused reassignment of already assigned handle IDs, which annulled their persistent identification. Unlike PURL, however, it was not the PID as such that was at stake here, but rather a technical and organizational error, primarily caused by the lack of own resources.

Problematic PID implementations by publishers in turn are probably not caused by a lack of financial resources, they are also different in nature: we found examples of publishers that obviously even failed to register DOIs (but nevertheless displayed these on landing pages and full text PDFs). Findings 21 by Klein & Balakireva (2021) also suggest that publishers do not necessarily facilitate unique identification of documents. Especially, the utilization and implementation of PIDs by publishers were reflected critically by two of the experts interviewed in our study.

These results highlight the opinion of an expert, who portrayed publishers as "the weakest link" (PID_14) in the PID system.

The examination of the Laakso, Matthias & Jahn (2021) sample revealed journals whose editors did not inform the registration agency that the publication had been discontinued, so the DOIs assigned pointed to invalid content. This last issue reflects neither organisational nor technical issues, but simply a lacking sense of responsibility possibly combined with a lack of resources.

A more detailed investigation of the extent to which publishers miss registering PIDs for published content could provide very interesting insight into the reliability of the PID system. This issue, unlike HTTP redirects, CMS configurations, or journals that cease to exist without fallback plans for assigned PIDs, was not mentioned by any expert, but seems in no way of lesser importance than the aforementioned issues, as registration precedes them in time and missing it may be considered even more serious.

21. Based on an analysis of HTTP answer codes.

And the reason [for the for hiding items behind re-directs and HTTP layers] is (...) because they don't want to make it easy for machines to navigate their environment, of course. So there's a weird thing going on there.

The importance of a committed organization

PID systems need commitment by an organization to run them -both in terms of financial and human resources. If organizations do not want to be responsible any more, and there are no backup plans in place, a PID system will fail.

One of the solutions for this was the commitment of a non-profit organization to PID maintenance (in the case of PURL). The majority of the interviews in this study felt that governance by a non-profit organization would vastly increase the sustainability of PID systems.

...once you start a PID, there's sort of the understanding that there is somebody who will be responsible for maintaining infrastructure, etc. And that's just more wishful thinking than some law or some requirement for somebody to sign papers: yes, I will be responsible. The reality of life is, for example, that PID infrastructure costs money to maintain. So that… there's this risk.

There is still a valid reason for doubt, though: "A thing that keeps bothering me is @OCLC having ended PURL support. They were nice enough to find an alternative (@internetarchive) to somehow sustain it. But, if a not for profit org with global membership and support can't keep a PID service alive, who can?" 22 One of the interesting points to raise here is that the tax status (e.g. non-profit) is not directly connected to an actual sustainable management of PID services. This can clearly be seen through the case of PURL.

Commitment to sustain PID infrastructures is crucially dependent on the willingness of the organization to actually run the system in the long term, no matter if they are for profit or not.

Another problem with PURL was that OCLC was solely responsible for it and that the data was not made openly available. Ceasing support meant that the system could not be recreated by the user community; they were directly dependent on OCLC to provide the service. Communication around the maintenance and status of PURL also was not open, which left the user community in the dark about the future of the PID.

Contingency plans

How can the risk of organizational failure to commit to a PID system be countered? One of the most important aspects here are contingency plans -contractual agreements between organizations stating that the responsibility for a PID will be taken over by another organization, ideally with clear plans on how this might work and openly shared to the user community.

22. https://twitter.com/hvdsomp/status/1308122184402055171 I would love people to stop putting as much faith in nonprofit status as they do. I just don't think it's relevant. Other people have pointed out that Harvard's nonprofit. It's got a high revenue but it's… a lot of people say it's a hedge fund with a college attached to it, right? There's nothing inherently noble about being a nonprofit. It's just the tax status."

And I think if you look at this, depending on how your organization is set up, then it is also the question, what are the policies you have to find to maintain the availability of all the PIDs. Maybe it is more difficult if you have a single organization because if the single organization is not available any more or cannot find the funds to sustain itself then you already have a challenge to ensure sustainability, but also the persistence of your service, but also the PIDs itself.

You know, pretending that you can't go out of business is not… no, it's not an option. Everybody can go out of business. We've seen huge organizations go out of business, we see countries disappear, from, you know, all sorts of things. This is not a strategy. A responsible thing to do is say, Okay, if this happened, what would it take to do it? Funding is a key topic here, in this case a contingency fund as a back-up if PID providers go out of business. As seen by the time it took to work out a plan between OCLC and the Internet Archive (over a year), it is most likely that bigger PID providers such as DataCite or Crossref would also need some time to wind down an organization:

Other issues of risk and trust

PURL's near-death experience serves as a good example of how NOT to handle a PID system that is at risk. Quite a few things went wrong in the winding down of PURL at OCLC that might damage the trust relationship between PURL users and OCLC in the long run. OCLC did not openly communicate about the state of PURL. It was clear to users that something was not working well, but it was not clear what exactly was happening. Without honest communication, the user community had no way of knowing if their reliance on PURL was in fact too risky. Those organizations, such as the DublinCore Initiative, that did (or could) not step back from using PURLs had to reach out to OCLC several times. This lack of communication was interpreted as a loss of interest by OCLC. There was no information on funding or development plans for PURLs and even if internally a discussion about its future might have taken place, the user community was not informed about it.

Secondly, it took almost two years for OCLC and the Internet Archive to come to terms about a takeover of PURL. There was clearly no contingency plan in place; it is in fact quite unclear if OCLC had any plans of keeping PURLs alive and stable. This fact has a big influence on the extent to which a user community can trust the sustainability of an infrastructure it depends on. With no fallback or backup planning in place, a PID system can "die" a pretty quick death or live in a "zombie" stage for a long period of time (as seen with PURLs).

Lastly, this case study has made clear that centralizing PID systems to just one responsible organization, without any sort of open data backup, is not a good idea at all. Even if the organization in question is defined as "nonprofit", that does not mean that a lack of commitment to keeping an infrastructure alive will mean the end of this infrastructure.

The case of the IRSN proves that a lack of use cases or perceived usefulness by potential applicants of a PID is a severe risk, this might especially affect adminoriented PIDs.

On the level of content providers (publishers, journals, repositories) apparently users (as authors or readers) take the reliability of these venues for granted without reflecting on possible risks. This is unsurprising, as no user undertakes a deeper analysis of CMS/web server configurations, a service's financial viability or checks whether they perform correct registration of PIDs. They usually only notice these errors when a PID cannot be resolved or their reference management software cannot import a full text, as the HTTP redirects prohibit this. This can lead to a general mistrust in PIDs as such, as well as a mistrust in the implementation at individual providers. Mistrust in PIDs as a whole could have a negative impact on their use, e.g. in bibliographies, and affect different types of PIDs (e.g. reduce the acceptance of ROR if people had poor experiences with DOIs).

And you're talking about actually winding down an organization, an infrastructure organization and trying to do it in a smooth way, you're going to need at least a year to do that. Let's just face that. And obviously, you've got to have the funds do that. It's easier if the data is open. Because then at least you're not having to deal with escrow and all these other weird things. I think that having something documented helps -and in the case of (organization), we've got a few things.

  It illustrates risks of failure through lack of organizational support from two perspectives: PURL serves as an example, where a PID provider ceased support for a system. The other perspective shows examples, in which PID-managing organizations fail to implement otherwise well-working PIDs in their systems, and the failed organizational implementation of the International Standard Report Number Identifier (ISRN).

  Ongoing problems with DOI resolving/ registration When on 23rd March 2022 the German publisher De

	11. http://eprints.rclis.org/
	12. https://web.archive.org/web/20200927014145/https://scidecode.com/2017/03/16/welches-open-access-repository-
	sollte-man-in-bibliotheks-informationswissenschaft-nutzen/
	13. e.g. the handle ID 17094 once pointed via the URL http://eprints.rclis.org/17094/ to this document: Mittelsdorf, B., &
	Herb, U. (2009). Access Data Mining: A new foundation for Added-value services in full text repositories.

(https://web.archive.org/web/20121031035059/http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/13711) whereas it now points to a different one: Falcato, Pedro and López, Alicia Isabel and Araujo, Juan Facundo Directrices para las transacciones de referencia en la Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial. Información, Cultura y Sociedad, 2004, n. 10, pp. 67-82. Obviously, even back in 2012 there was already a re-direct active as the ID of the internet archive's mirrored version is not the same as the one originally assigned to paper be e-LIS. This can be checked by pasting the URL (including the handle, http://eprints.rclis.org/17094/) into the internet archive's seach slot under https://archive.org/. 14. https://web.archive.org/web/20111109103717/http://eprints.rclis.org/cms/about

Rationale

Insights in failed PIDs and unreliable PID implementations

Issues around risk and trust

Authorship


Keywords: 19 4, Authorship 5, Literature Case study Contents

The gradual implementation of organisational identifiers (OrgIDs)

This case study is part of a series that has been produced within the study on "Risks and Trust in pursuit of a well-functioning PID infrastructure for research" commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange in July 2021. The main outcome of this study is a report examining the current PID landscape with an emphasis on its risks and trust-related issues. This complementary series of case studies aims to provide a deeper insight into specific areas of activity, workflows and stakeholders within this wider PID landscape.

Rationale

Same as in the case of persistent author identifiers before international players like ISNI and ORCID arrived, it makes sense for organisational identifiers (OrgIDs) to be initially collected and maintained at a national level. This is particularly so in view of the complexity associated to OrgIDs, with entries for organisations frequently undergoing changes that need regular updates. OrgIDs are significantly more complex to implement than author IDs -in a way, it's as if authors actually changed their name every few years, only the ownership of an OrgID record is not as easy to assign as it is in the case of authors. Moreover, as opposite to author IDs, the most relevant use cases for OrgIDs do not lie with publishers but with other stakeholders such as research funders. Although a significant number of countries already keep some kind of national registry for (research-performing) organisations, it's only in January 2019 that the Research Organization Registry (ROR) was officially launched as the default international approach for the persistent identification of organisations [START_REF] Gould | Hear us ROR! Announcing our first prototype and next steps[END_REF] .

There is thus a certain tension between 'centralising forces', meaning attempts to provide a unique, international framework for OrgID implementation, and a myriad of 'centrifugal pressures' which may drive specific stakeholders (specifically national-level funders) to choose their own way forward in the confidence that a mechanism will eventually be found to reconcile both trends.

This case study looks first into the process that led to choosing RORinitially based on the Digital Science Global Research Identifier (GRID) database -as the default international framework for the provision of OrgIDs.

An attempt is also made at providing an insight into the challenges posed by the current developments such as this need to reconcile comprehensive registries kept at a national level with the parallel emergence of international OrgIDs. This specifically raises the issue of multiple-level OrgIDs and how this objective may be achieved going forward. In line with the general aim of the wider work for the Knowledge Exchange, the emerging OrgID landscape will be examined from a risk and trust perspective.

2. The gradual implementation of organisational identifiers (OrgIDs)

OrgIDs: a bit of history

The case for the persistent identification of researchperforming organisations has been out there for quite a long time -OrgIDs were already on the radar shortly after ORCID was launched as an international persistent identifier for authors, since it made sense to couple the author ID to an additional, specific ID for the organisations authors are affiliated with2 . At the time, back in 2013, Ringgold was proposed as an early solution to couple ORCIDs to OrgIDs. The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the largest, almost hegemonic public research funder in Portugal, was a prominent member of this working group around OrgIDs and a paper on the topic was subsequently presented in 2016 at the 13th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2016) organised by euroCRIS [START_REF] Amante | Communicating and Measuring Research Responsibly: Profiling, Metrics, Impact, Interoperability[END_REF] . In this contribution, "PTCRIS_OrgID -Portuguese Organisation Identifiers Authoritative System", an FCT team presented its plans "to build a first version of an authoritative National Organisations Database, to develop an organisation reconciliation service and to set up a registration system for those organisations" within the PT-CRIS national-level research information management framework in Portugal. The proposed strategy for developing such infrastructure was based on the ISNI+ model identified by the Jisc CASRAI-UK OrgID WG report above.

A more recent submission from FCT to the CRIS2022 conference to be held in May 2022 5 states that the PT-CRIS research information system is using the Ringgold Identify Database as an authoritative source [START_REF]Ringgold Identify Database[END_REF] . Ringgold -in conjunction with ISNI -was in fact the first recommendation in the Jisc-CASRAI report and other European national funders are also considering it as the main candidate solution for implementing their own OrgID layer.

However, Ringgold is a for-profit operator, which would seem to contradict certain principles for a sustainable, community-driven PID infrastructure [START_REF] Bilder | Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1[END_REF] . In fact the Research Organization Registry (ROR) international initiative that is quickly growing is actually based on the second solution identified in the Jisc-CASRAI report, namely the open GRID database of organisations that Digital Science launched in 2015 and used to maintain and curate [START_REF] Kundu | GRID passes the torch to ROR[END_REF] . ROR is managed by a steering group in which the California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science are represented and makes a strong emphasis on openness. This open, community-driven solution may eventually pose some sustainability issues even if the backing of the initiative by both CrossRef and DataCite would seem to provide certain guarantees for its mid-and long-term sustainability. ROR has recently launched a fundraising campaign [START_REF] Gould | ROR begins a new round of community fundraising[END_REF] and its evolution closely follows the pioneering approach successfully applied by ORCID, with a focus on the PID integration into a number of technical solutions by various stakeholders [START_REF]Active ROR Integrations[END_REF] . A similar roadmap is being drawn in the Netherlands: recommendation no 3 in the 2021 report "NWO Persistent Identifier Strategy" 13 calls for the implementation of research organisation IDs in grant application and project reporting workflows. While mentioning Ringgold, ISNI and the CrossRef Funder registry as additional relevant actors in the area of OrgIDs, the report states that "at this point, it would be sensible to recommend to implement RoR in NWO grant application and project reporting workflows". In Austria, where a project called RIS Synergy is bringing together a number of institutions and research funders -with the Austrian Science Fund FWF notably included among the latter -under the lead of TU Wien, plans are also being put together for a widespread assignation of OrgIDs to Austrian research-performing organisation via a registration process with Ringgold.

Domain

In Like the RSNR, the metadata is curated by local correspondents with special administration rights.

All these pre-existing attempts to provide a nationallevel OrgID framework are what we dub the 'centrifuge pressures' in this case study, meaning that the current strategy for a widespread international OrgID implementation using ROR as the default approach is likely to coexist moving forward with multiple nationallevel efforts -not that dissimilar to the DAIs which are the subject of another case study in this series -mainly driven by research funders to implement and curate national registries for research-perfoming organisations in the country, possibly aiming for multiple-level identification. These national-level initiatives will clearly require some degree of international coordination, especially around a default approach for the implementation of multiple-level OrgIDs.

At the same time, if the community-driven path that ROR is taking were able to replicate best practice integrations with research funders' initiatives at a national level like ORCID did in its time [START_REF] Moreira | An ORCID based synchronization framework for a national CRIS ecosystem[END_REF] , a solution might be reached for a simultaneous deepening of OrgID implementation at both an international and at a national level in a growing number of countries. There is nevertheless a significant number of challenges that such a collaboration would need to address -these are explored in more detail in the section below devoted to risk and trust issues.

ROR All the other cases for OrgID implementation would mainly serve the needs of research funders and institutions. The fact that ROR has specifically stated that their main goal is to pursue the publishers' use case has two key implications:

`For this use case only top-level OrgIDs are required, since the goal is to persistently identify the organisation a given corresponding author is affiliated with, be it for research attribution or for Gold Open Access management purposes. While this route will clearly lead to the eventual inclusion of ROR as a standard in manuscript submission systems, or perhaps to its automated harvesting from the corresponding author's ORCID profile where the OrgID may be available, it doesn't serve the other cases for OrgID implementation in the table above;

`Leaving these other cases that serve the needs of research funders and institutions unaddressed will drive a parallel effort by these other groups of stakeholders to implement multiple-level OrgIDs so that a hierarchical subset of secondary and successive-level identifiers can also be made available. This is a challenging initiative in itself since the "keep it simple" approach initially adopted by ROR also aims to keep the number of required updates arising from changes in organisational names manageable. In countries where a national research funder is hegemonic such as those mentioned in the previous section, an alliance between institutions and such funders could be envisioned where a default workflow is defined for a collaborative approach to organisational record curation and maintenance, but this may well mean a challenging endeavour in larger countries with a more fragmented research landscape.

For the moment, the most important topic now is the evolution of ROR and PIDs for institutions.

Footnote on page 10 of the NWO Persistent Identifier Strategy

The Path to Department Level IDs project proposes a Linked Open Data-based approach to extending top-level RORs by adding extra metadata to the ROR ID record for a given institution. These additional metadata elements would include related entries to the top-level ROR ID such as equivalent entries in other languages or -critically -parent and child organisations (see an example for UC Davis in the slide below from the project presentation in 2020). Some project documentation on extending ROR is also available for UC Davis and other organisations collaborating in the project [START_REF]Documentation on extending ROR[END_REF] .

The proposed approaches for the implementation of hierarchical OrgIDs are two-fold:

1. Creation of datasets that list the various units within a specific organisation, the relationship between such units, and some mechanism for each to extend the top-level ROR ID for the organisation. This could be a centralised or a distributed process: i. Centralised: generated and stewarded by a suitable stakeholder such as an institution, a consortium, a research funder or directly by ROR

ii. Distributed: generated by a public contributor and stored in GitHub, allowing for both volunteer contributions and some provenance 2. Creating Wikidata on the institutional units that can then be used to extend or relate the data to ROR. This would be another example of a decentralised effort Both methods would require ROR to create a metadata field that would point to the extension dataset. While this approach may raise issues of trust -more on this below --it would also allow the stakeholders mentioned above to progress with the identification of organisational sub-units while ROR works on the implementation of the necessary metadata developments for this extension to effectively become operational. A best practice case study approach could then be disseminated for frontrunner countries where a research funder were able to bring together the research institutions in the country and figure out the most suitable mechanism for this dataset to be properly curated and maintained.

And then ROR... ROR is pretty nascent, really, in the scheme of things and there are older and more mature commercial alternatives. Ringgold probably being the primary of them. But there are many others that have greater coverage, but don't have the benefit of that community-led kind of openness, and also interoperability with other open PID standards. So I think ROR could benefit from greater coverage. And I think, again, publishers could provide that by saying: "These are the areas that aren't being covered by ROR.

How can we get those within the database?" And we're in conversation with the ROR team, when indirectly through the GRID2, the previous GRID team, as well, about how we can best support them in identifying and expanding the database.

The Path to Department Level IDs project has already engaged with several stakeholders to test its approach to multiple-level ROR IDs, see below for instance the parent-child relationship for a number of research institutes at the Italian National Research Council (CNR). Top-level ROR entries have been created for these child entries for CNR research institutes, but the feature to link a parent organisation to its secondarylevel OrgIDs via the ROR ID record metadata is not yet available. The project's 'future directions' section states that it needs more stakeholders to create ROR extensions and provide feedback on the process.

A recent discussion on the implementation of persistent identifiers for research instruments and facilities held within the EOSC Association Task Force for PID Policy and Implementation has hinted at the possibility of also using ROR IDs for this purpose.

Where research instruments and facilities are part of the hierarchical structure for a specific organisation, these could be covered by this approach towards multiple-level OrgIDs. Where these are independent facilities not associated with any specific research organisation, they could be assigned top-level ROR IDs, see an example below.

3 Issues around risks and trust regarding the implementation of OrgIDs

Due to the complexity of the process to implement OrgIDs, the number of risks and trust-related issues raised by this effort may well be the largest one for any emerging 'admin-oriented' PID. Some of these issues are summarised below.

Open vs commercial infrastructure and its impact on sustainability

While ROR seems to be gradually consolidating as the standard of choice for a widespread international implementation of OrgIDs, a look at the ROR documentation, as well as at that available for initiatives like ORCID or even the Path to Department Level IDs mentioned above, shows that ROR is likely to coexist with other parallel OrgID approaches such as Ringgold. This raises a potential sustainability issue for the not-for-profit initiative based on an open infrastructure (ROR). Having member organisations CrossRef and DataCite in its steering committee provides a certain guarantee for mid-and long-term sustainability in this regard, but this will probably also mean a slower progress of an initiative that comes under the umbrella of organisations that are involved in the implementation of a number of additional PIDs. As mentioned above, ROR has recently launched (Feb'2022) a community fundraising appeal [START_REF] Gould | ROR begins a new round of community fundraising[END_REF] . For sustainability purposes it would be good to see a number of solid national consortia becoming committed to ROR as a default approach to OrgIDs same as we saw the gradual emergence of an increasing number of ORCID consortia in various European countries.

Much of this support will of course rely on the services that ROR is able to provide and its level of integration with other well-established solutions beyond publishers. Its work around organisational attribution for datasets or publications stored in research repositories are sound steps in this direction, but the fuzzy ownership of the institutional record makes it advisable for it to engage with university consortia and associations of research funders. The discontinuation of the PIDapalooza series

We want to have persistent identifiers that are managed by organisations that operate on a not-for-profit basis. They should work according to a philosophy based on Open Science principles, transparency, reliability, sustainability. And ideally, as is the case with ORCID, for instance, we should be dealing with organisations funded by membership fees, and that they have a management elected by its members. They should also have a plan or a vision to ensure the sustainability and the longevity of the organisation in the longer run. And ideally, there should also be some transition plans explaining what should happen when the system needs to be terminated unexpectedly. Also some protection, I guess, against the organisation's takeover by commercial companies. We want to make sure that these crucial building blocks of our scholarly infrastructure do not depend on commercial interests, that they are not subject to the economic rules of the commercial market. Of course, I guess we also want to avoid a lock-in with a specific commercial vendor.

of events [START_REF] Meadows | PIDapalooza is taking a break[END_REF] poses a serious challenge from a dissemination perspective, but other events may be able to fill the gap and allow the presentation of best practice case studies in ROR ID implementation.

Community involvement

The current workflow for ROR ID registration mostly relies on research organisations applying for a top-level persistent identifier. While there is parallel support from DataCite and CrossRef for their member organisations to also become part of ROR, some energetic effort to engage larger research communities seems to be required. Otherwise there is a clear risk of fragmentation, at least in the short term. To the extent to which ROR may be able to follow the steps of ORCID in terms of community involvement, it could be expected for the various parallel initiatives for OrgID implementation to gradually converge regardless of the registration agency each of these originally used.

This risk may no doubt be mitigated via a transparent reporting on the gradual uptake of ROR with statistics by country and best practice case studies, but it's also linked to an issue around trust. Specifically on the area of multiple-level OrgID implementation, some default recommended approach must be agreed and promoted. The Path to Department Level IDs project seems a well-conceived way forward at this point, and it could significantly benefit from a wider community engagement effort. This could lay the basis for a trust-building exercise which would attract a growing number of participants into the initiative.

In the area of community engagement it's also worth repeating here a remark made above regarding the (perhaps temporary) discontinuation of the PIDapalooza series of events. As the persistent identifier domain becomes ever more mainstream, it would be advisable to have specific events where progress in their implementation can be discussed with the multi-faceted community of users and implementers. PIDapalooza has traditionally offered a generic forum to discuss all things PID, but at this stage it could make sense for future events to focus on a specific set of PIDs so that the discussions can be more fruitful. The opportunities offered by virtual events -still prevalent at the time of writingcould also be exploited to allow participants from many different regions to participate without needing to travel long distances. The EOSC Association seems a particularly good candidate for organising these sorts of events going forward if PIDapalooza were not to return.

A final remark in the area of community engagement regards the possible role that Current Research Information Systems or CRISs could play in the widespread implementation of multiple-level OrgIDs. Because these systems -especially when implemented at a national or a regional level -already offer a comprehensive coverage for the research organisations operating in (and often beyond) a specific country, they could provide a very suitable basis for an automated generation of OrgIDs, both top-level and secondarylevel ones. Including CRIS systems on the list of technical integrations for ROR implementation would thus represent an effective community engagement strategy on top of the currently ongoing ones.

So, for example, the problem with organisational IDs, the RORs and the Ringgolds: No [PID Advisory] Board member will ever understand why this is currently not already in place. And I need to talk to them about why it's important. And what the next steps are, that will fix some of the problems that we have there. What they can do to make sure that OrgIDs are part of the mix that will help them solve some of their impact measurement problems or monitoring or evaluation problems. And, yeah, maybe I should do that myself more, make those use cases more strategic. But it would be helpful if for all of these identifiers, there's a use case for researchers, there's a good use case that spells out to the funder, and it spells out to the board members of universities, why they should be involved.

Use case implementation: OrgIDrelated services

In order to benefit from a wider approach to OrgIDrelated services than just research attribution it's critical for stakeholders like research funders to become more proactive with regard to OrgID implementation. Only through funder involvement it will become clear how ROR IDs may be put to use in a variety of contexts such as those mentioned in the table on page 7 above. Were ROR to follow the footsteps or ORCID in terms of a gradual development of an ever wider array of services, this ORCID Reducing Burden and Improving Transparency (ORBIT) project 20 would provide a good example to try and replicate.

Related to this it's also worth raising that while there are few or no studies on the penetration of ORCID into the area of researchers working for the private sector, OrgIDs would need to specifically address this private-sector organisations given their ever increasing relevance in the research funding landscape. Research funders are uniquely placed to make this happen since many of them already have comprehensive registries of the research-performing organisations they fund both in the public and the private sector. However, best practice case studies on how to engage funders in the implementation of OrgIDs are lacking at the moment. The same applies to raising awareness of OrgIDs among private-sector organisations and devising specific services that might persuade them of the value of having such persistent identifiers.

A particularly pressing challenge in terms of trust is the need to come up with some default approach for ensuring an appropriate curation and maintenance of multiplelevel OrgIDs, whereby changes in organisational names or structure would have a default and reliable mechanism for being reported and updated in a reasonably agile fashion. In some ways this marks a return to authority catalogue management as traditionally performed by libraries, and this in turn would suggest relying on ISNI for the purpose of record maintenance. There is no silver bullet around this issue though and in this regard the community will need to learn by doing, again relying on specific best practice examples.

  OrgIDs were one of the three main areas of work defined by the Jisc CASRAI-UK Pilot launched in 2014 to improve research interoperability. The subsequent report "Review of selected organisational IDs and development of use cases for the Jisc CASRAI-UK Organisational Identifiers Working Group" released in 2015 3 explored different approaches, technical solutions and governance models a widespread implementation of OrgIDs in the UK might eventually be based on. The report proposed a so-called ISNI+ model in which ISNI would play a backbone role for metadata collection purposes, working in tandem with a number of possible registration agencies -Ringgold and Digital Science being among the suggested ones.

  France, the National Directory of Research Structures (RNSR) is a database managed by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It groups together public and private scientific research structures in France, in particular laboratories, and assigns them a unique identifier. Its content can be consulted publicly. It is administered by the Ministry of Research but the content is updated by RNSR correspondents of research structure supervisory institutions (mainly universities and national research organisations), who have a login and a password. Due to the decentralised curation of the database, the quality of the organisational metadata is variable and unreliable (partly incomplete and/or out of date). There are plans to evolve the RNSR in the next few years. The same national identifier is used by the French public research tool ScanR for exploring the research and innovation landscape in France.Besides this national OrgID, there are at least two other national identifiers for research organisations in France: the main research organisation CNRS maintains an internal identifier for its over 1,100 research laboratories while the national open repository HAL contains a database (AuréHAL) with a quite precise description of the research structures (= author affiliation), with six different levels from the research team to the research organisation, with a specific identifier for each level.

  The drive towards multiple-level OrgIDsThe list of use cases for the implementation of OrgIDs identified by the 2015 Jisc-CASRAI report shown in the table above is collated on the basis of areas of activity: publishing, business intelligence, reporting, etc. A very useful additional classification of such use cases is by the group of stakeholders it mainly aims to serve. There are three main groups of such stakeholders: publishers, research funders and institutions. The first use casepublishing -with its emphasis on research attribution and the appropriate routing of APC payments is clearly the publishers' use case (the assignment of publications to Read & Publish -aka transformative -agreements is a further area these OrgIDs serve, even if not included in the list as these agreements only became widely implemented following the release of Plan S in Sep 2018).

	is another example of a scheme we were
	able to bootstrap very quickly, because of the
	previous work that we did around GRID. In other
	words, right now ROR is useful. You can go and
	find identifiers for almost any institution that's
	actively engaged in research and is publishing
	research. Is its uptake wide? No. But is it actually
	useful out of the gate? Absolutely. So it's difficult

to judge maturity in that way. Because what you're really looking at is two things: whether it's immediately useful [in general] and [specifically] for those few people who take it up.

2.2

  Technically, it seems that ROR is not good enough to identify secondary-level institutions, any local laboratory at a lower level. So it's a problem. Okay, I can identify CNRS in France, or Harvard or MIT or Tübingen University, but I need to identify laboratories, institutes of research, etc. and we need a global solution very quickly. Because for the moment, every country is inventing a local solution. It was one of my concerns, and the question I would like you to answer during your inquiry would be: can you give us the maximum possible information about this topic of institutional identifiers? We know that Ringgold has done a fantastic job. But the system is enclosed, it's costly and it's not shareable. Will it be open? Will it be offered to the world and financed by somebody else? It's stupid to redo Ringgold, and Ringgold is here. So what will the next step be? Despite the pessimistic reflection by the 2019 FREYA project quoted below on the difficulty of coming up with a "clear and consistent policy" regarding multiple-level OrgIDs, work is currently underway to find a suitable approach for this purpose. A project called "The Path to Department Level IDs" led by the University of California Davis and the University of Harvard with the American Physical Society, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the ID Fuse start-up in the Netherlands among its partners was presented at the PIDapalooza 2020 event in Lisbon[START_REF] Grant | The Path to Department Level IDs[END_REF] .

		pandemic struck, which meant an inevitable slowing of
		the project progress, but there's a reference to it in a
		footnote of the NWO Persistent Identifier Strategy report
		published by Maria Cruz and Clifford Tatum in the
		Netherlands in Apr 2021, see below. This may suggest
		that specific research funders are keeping this
		development in mind for an eventual implementation of
		multiple-level OrgIDs in coordination with ROR.
		1 While RoR is focused on the specific use case
		of top-level organizations, many have voiced
		interest in organization identifiers for sub-units
	`In terms of the data modeling for institutional	within institutional hierarchies (faculties,
	information, we found ROR granularity more	departments, institutes). An international
	or less aligned with the interests of Identifiers.	collaboration (The Path to Departmental level
	org. However, by only modeling top level	PIDs) is presently working to extend the RoR
	institutional information it is currently	scheme to include departmental level organizations.
	superficial and may not suit stakeholders	Although an external project among two US
	requiring greater granularity to identify	universities, a European funder (SNSF), and the
	organizational subunits like departments,	ID Fuse organization based in the Netherlands,
	teams, etc.	the project is coordinating with RoR and plans to
		develop a tool to integrate hierarchical
	`Due to the ROR approach of confining	relationships in the existing RoR schema.
	identifiers to entities residing on the higher
	levels of organization architecture (e.g.
	identifying institutes, but exclude departments
	within organizations) we are also consolidating
	some of the granularity of our registry if
	applying ROR IDs only. It is questionable
	whether a clear and consistent policy can
	even be applied in this regard considering the
	very fluid and complex structures within
	research organizations.
	Two reflections on ROR ID granularity on the
	FREYA project D4.4 "Organizational IDs in
	Practice" 15

The project presentation by Carolyn Grant from the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics meant a timely follow-up to the unofficial plenary session on OrgIDs led by Patricia Cruse, Laure Haak and Ed Pentz (respectively Executive Directors of DataCite, ORCID and Crossref) that was held at the inaugural PIDapalooza event in Reykjavik in Nov 2016

[START_REF] Meadows | PIDapalooza -the open festival for persistent identifiers[END_REF]

. The presentation also took place shortly before the Covid-19

The gradual implementation of organisational identifiers (OrgIDs)

Issues around risks and trust regarding the implementation of OrgIDs

Authorship


This case study is part of a series that has been produced within the study on "Risks and Trust in pursuit of a well-functioning PID infrastructure for research" commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange in July 2021. The main outcome of this study is a report examining the current PID landscape with an emphasis on its risks and trust-related issues. This complementary series of case studies aims to provide a deeper insight into specific areas of activity, workflows and stakeholders within this wider PID landscape.

Rationale

The Dutch Digital Author Identifier remains the best example to date for a successful superseding/ replacement of an existing PID layer by a new, more comprehensive solution.

Initiatives like ORCID and ISNI are fairly consolidated by now and no-one would consider a national-level author ID project to be worth the effort, but both these international initiatives are relatively recent and before they arrived it made sense to try and implement a national-level author ID keeping in mind the fact that it might eventually need to be superseded.

There are several reasons why a DAI case study makes sense in the context of this work around risks and trust issues for a well-functioning PID landscape. Not only this initiative has been little documented in the literature thus far (if at all), but the successful process for its superseding provides a valuable blueprint for a possible way forward in other PID areas where the landscape is rather fragmented. This is particularly relevant for emerging PIDs for organisations (OrgIDs), instruments and facilities (PIDINSTs) and even for grant IDs.

The lesson that this case study provides is that a fragmented PID landscape with potentially diverging technical solutions may not be a critical issue as long as there is a contingency plan for an eventual replacement or superseding of a given solution in a way that ensures the interoperability of the end result.

This case study looks into how the arrival of the international ORCID identifier for persistent author identification impacted the DAI initiative in the Netherlands and how the DAI was eventually superseded by a combination of ORCIDs and ISNIs. From a perspective of risks and trust issues around persistent identifiers, the DAI provides an interesting case study for several reasons: The Digital Author Identifier (DAI) in the Netherlands was the first initiative in the world to implement a national-level persistent identifier for researchers. `It is an example for a successful superseding/ replacement of an early PID implemented at a national level by an international initiative that would quickly consolidate as a well-established solution worldwide. This is particularly relevant for some of the ongoing early initiatives to implement emerging PIDs that could eventually face a similar replacement or superseding.

`The process to add an ORCID layer for persistent author identifiers on top of the DAI is relevant not just from a technical perspective, but from a community-oriented one too. Questions like how Dutch researchers took such an early overhauling of the national DAI or how the replacement/superseding process was communicated to them are very pertinent from a trust perspective.

`This case study also raises the issue of communityowned vs 'commercial' PID infrastructure: while ORCID has been implemented as a persistent author identifier on the basis of a non-profit membership organisation, the interviews with PID experts conducted as a background to this study have repeatedly included discussions on sustainability and whether it might be possible for such PID infrastructures to remain public with the appropriate funding mechanisms in place.

The following text providing some background on the implementation process for the Dutch DAI is taken from KNAW's Elly Dijk's "NARCIS: linking CRISs and OARs in the Netherlands. A matter of standards and identifiers" presentation at the I Workshop on CRIS, CERIF and Institutional Repositories (Rome, 2010), http://hdl.handle.net/11366/37:

It makes sense for a persistent author identifier to beat least initially -defined at a national level, since this is the level at which most research policies operate in a given country. This includes a research information management policy, a 'repository policy' to make research outputs openly available and/or a research funder policy to clearly and uniquely identify researchers applying for project funding, reviewing project proposals or becoming involved in the projects they fund. Some means of internal author identification tends moreover to be available at a national level, which can in turn be crosslinked with the (usually also available nationally) directory of research-performing organisations. The effort to make available and consolidate international standards for the persistent, unique identification of researchers and research organisations is a highly ambitious endeavour and requires a solid technical foundation, a clear set of use cases for their implementation and a strong community involvement to succeed. ORCID would probably not have succeeded -or at least not so quickly -had it not been able to rely on the already developed ResearcherID platform that ThomsonReuters made available for the initiative and on the grant funding provided by the US Alfred P Sloan Foundation or the National Science Foundation.

To connect the information in NARCIS coming from all these different databases and repositories the first step has been to assign a Digital Author Identifier (DAI) to researchers in the Netherlands. This identifier acts like a digital glue in realising the integration of information regardless of how the researcher's name, initials or surname are spelled in the different systems. Within the OCLC library system a thesaurus of author names with corresponding DAIs was created. All the involved institutions have matched the DAIs and author names in their own CRIS (Metis). This work was finished at the end of 2008. The next step is the implementation of the DAI in the repositories of the participants, in the NOD, and in EASY. We expect this to be ready at the end of 2010 (...)

While DAIs are no longer in use for persistent author identification purposes in the Netherlands -they have been replaced by ISNIs and ORCIDs -the identifiers are still kept in the databases and it's still possible to retrieve them by using the info:eu-repo application profile that was defined when they were first created. DAIs are expressed as 9-digit strings and are usually stored in the national-level NARCIS portal alongside the authors' ORCIDs.

The best way to find the researcher with DAI 110254589 -as an example -would be to search for the string info:eu-repo/ dai/nl/110254589 on a browser. Because this is the namespace and format for having DAIs stored in NARCIS [START_REF]DAI spec in the info:eu-repo application profile[END_REF] , the browser will be able to locate the NARCIS record for the researcher, see below, even if the DAI itself is not being used anymore.

By clicking on the browser result in NARCIS we can then retrieve the individual record for this researcher. The section devoted to identifiers within that person record shows the DAI together with other connected author IDs such as the ISNI and the ORCID. Both these 'live' author IDs (ISNI and ORCID) are hyperlinked to their metadata pages for this author, namely https://isni.org/isni/0000000109163015 and https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3045-5570 while the DAI is not hyperlinked anymore.

The ISNI webpage for this author still includes a reference to the original DAI in the section devoted to "sources", even if again it's not hyperlinked in the same way other sources are such as the ARK record http://ark.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ cb155030473 kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, or the nid in the Catalogue of the German National Library (DNB), https://d-nb.info/gnd/173885896.

The 'note on the future of the Dutch infrastructure for author identifiers' The emergence of the DAI as a first solution for unique and persistent author identification addressed the two main issues that ORCID would later tackle as well: the parallel problems of (i) duplicated names (i.e. different researchers with the same name) and the difficulties in attributing the publications to the right author and of (ii) duplicated author entries whereby the same person would be recorded with different names due to variations in pen name on the publications, due to name changes upon marriage or other factors.

The tightly integrated nature of the Dutch research information management landscape at the time the DAI was conceived -where all Dutch universities and a number of research centres were using the same CRIS solution, namely METIS -together with the existence of the OCLC/PICA Dutch Thesaurus of Author Names (NTA) containing entries for all published authors in the country made it possible to devise a workflow to register unique and persistent author identifiers -coupled to NTA entries -whose metadata would be provided by institutions via their METIS CRIS systems.

This workflow was disrupted by the decision to move away from METIS -a home-grown CRIS originally developed at the Radboud University Nijmegen -as a common CRIS solution for all Dutch universities and by the realisation that the new international author identifiers made more sense in an area like research where national borders are largely meaningless. This note on the future of the Dutch infrastructure for author identifiers explores the possible options to keep minting and maintaining DAIs on the basis of 'new' CRIS solutions such as Pure (Elsevier) and Converis (ThomsonReuters at the time) and at the same time to merge the DAI layer into ISNI or ORCID.

On this latter aspect, both the note and the presentation by Van Dijk and Doove highlight several key aspects that were kept in mind when deciding which way to go in terms of superseding the DAIs: These recommendations would eventually be followed, as shown in the current NARCIS record for an example researcher above that includes his DAI, ISNI and ORCID identifiers.

`
The "NWO Persistent Identifier Strategy" 3 Issues around risks and trust regarding the transition away from DAIs

As mentioned above there are several aspects in which the replacement/ superseding of Digital Author Identifiers in the Netherlands constitutes an interesting case study for PID management regarding the risks and trust issues that are the focus of this study.

The process for having DAIs replaced and/or superseded

The recommendations made in the note on the future of the Dutch infrastructure for author identifiers were largely followed. New coupling mechanisms were eventually devised for 'new' institutional CRIS solutions like Pure or Converis and the suggested workflow was also implemented to create (or update) ISNIs for existing DAIs via the integration of the Dutch Thesaurus of Author Names (NTA) into the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF, https://www.oclc.org/en/viaf.html) then transferring these into the ISNI database to create ISNI IDs that could later be completed with additional metadata like institutional affiliation by directly exporting DAIs into the ISNI database.

At the same time the ORCID solution was promoted across researchers and institutions, the former being prompted to create, self-claim and maintain their ORCID profiles at no cost. This would eventually become a mainstream effort by Dutch institutions when SURF -as it was also recommended in this report -became a member of ORCID 8 and started running pilots with pioneering institutions to make ORCIDs available for all their staff. This is the same way the ORCID adoption process worked in other countries.

Technical vs community-oriented issues regarding trust

While the technical superseding of DAIs was reasonably straightforward, there was also a need to explain the update to the end-users of the persistent identifier scheme, i.e. the researchers themselves, who had previously been told that DAIs would become the default approach to author identification in the Netherlands.

This potential trust-related issue was successfully addressed via the direct involvement of institutionsmainly via their CRIS administrators -in the process for issuing author identifiers of one sort or another. The original workflow for minting DAIs involved the coupling between the institutional METIS CRIS and the Dutch Thesaurus NTA as shown in the figure on the next page. This was a manual process carried out by each METIS CRIS administrator. Multiple or successive researcher's affiliations with various Dutch institutions could thus overlap into a single DAI that would receive input from different CRIS systems.

Inlezen van NTA in ISNI via VIAF.

All researchers affiliated with Dutch institutions were assigned a DAI but because of the early nature of the development there were no use cases yet for actually using them for identification purposes with publishers or funders. This meant that even if researchers may have been aware of the new author ID infrastructure, there were actually very few or no opportunities for effectively using them.

This changed with the arrival of ORCIDs, which is an author identification initiative heavily supported by publishers and CrossRef. ORCID had thus a very clear use case right from the outset in making sure a means became available for publishers to be able to tell a given Jan Janssen in a specific publication from his namesake researcher working in a different research field. Likewise, the ORCID registration workflow made it necessary for the researcher to confirm his/ her identity via an email address, meaning that -as stated in the report above -ORCIDs were actually sitting much closer to researchers than DAIs or ISNIs had ever been and would ever be.

Public vs 'commercial' PID infrastructures

As mentioned above, this is an issue that has been frequently raised in the interviews with PID experts from various organisations that provide the backbone to this study. This issue is also clearly present in the recommendation included in the report on the future of the Dutch author identifier infrastructure to have DAIs "transferred" into the ISNI database. Although the report also mentions contacts with ORCID back in 2012 to ensure that a DAI holder would be able to couple the new ORCID to the pre-existing DAI upon ORCID registration, these conversations saw no follow-up and the 2015 report subsequently endorsed the ISNI/VIAF option instead.

The interviews with PID experts on this topic mainly addressed the issue of sustainability. Despite the enormous progress made by ORCID in securing integrations with many different stakeholders in the scholarly communications domain, there was a widespread perception among interviewees that if for instance National Libraries were able to maintain this sort of infrastructure (which would of course need the appropriate funding allocation), it might be possible to better address certain issues such as how to maintain DOIs from publishers that cease operations. There is also an occasional -if not widespread -perception among the user community that ORCIDs are tools specifically designed to serve the needs of publishers, a perception that carries some weight even if it's not entirely true -research funders are increasingly benefitting from ORCID use as well as institutions themselves. Finally the perceived lack of mechanisms devoted to ensure data quality is a topic that gets regularly raised by the community. [START_REF] Baglioni | We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications[END_REF][START_REF] Ritter | Problems with ORCID, or 10 reasons why I don't have an ORCID number[END_REF] When you mentioned all these different types of identifiers for all these different types of things, and then thinking about the infrastructure and the manpower, and all it would require to put that in place, promoted, maintained over the long term? I'm getting the shivers. And I've shared this many times with people. I say: "Yeah, absolutely. We need persistent identifiers for all of that. But are we going to create an organisation for each of those that we then need to become a member of?" I think that's really just not sustainable.

Again, for me, [the issue] is way more [about] the long-term sustainability. And basically, the budget that comes with all that, and especially [with] this notion of really long term, I mean, we're talking not five years, 10 years, we're talking really long term here. And when I think about [the] really long term, I keep coming back to the cultural heritage organisations, the national libraries, and so on, that have been with us for 100, 200 years as kind of good places for that kind of infrastructure.

Then on the other hand, just for the sustainability of it, I cannot imagine those organisations to be equally innovative, and hip, and all, you know, in the way that these PID organisations are. So from a marketing perspective, I think it would not be a great idea. From a long term sustainability perspective, I think it's way more logical to have this kind of very significant long term responsibility in the hands of multiple cultural, long-term cultural heritage organisations.

So, while DAIs have in fact been superseded by a combination of ISNIs and ORCIDs, the SURF report raises some concerns on the way forward and firmly chooses to rely on an international standard (ISNI) "that foresees a central quality control guaranteed by the Bibliothèque National de France and the British Library". This is why the economic model of ORCID is weak. ORCID cannot sell services of high quality because of the original model of ORCID: it's free, it's for every researcher, there is no quality control, there is no hassle to people. So it's a limitation of the development of ORCID for the future. I think there is no solution. Because you don't ask people to prove who they are. And if you don't manage the unicity of ORCID, then one person can have 10, 20 ORCIDs and we can do nothing against that. For ORCID, the problem is not a technical problem, it's a conceptual problem. But this is the price to pay for a free system that people are keen to adopt.

However, in terms of quality control, ORCID has gotten better at that, but especially in those years, they weren't as proficient at that as they are now I would say. So they didn't do a lot of checking for double email, for double ORCIDs that were made by researchers, or checking whether the organisational email was indeed someone that worked there. So the validation steps were not as thorough as they are now. So you couldn't fully rely on ORCID to take all the functionality, including the quality standards that we wanted to meet from the DAI part. This metadata quality is something that for libraries is their bread and living, that's there. So, the libraries specifically asked us to not just say, okay, ORCID is going to be the de facto standard in research information, so just do that. They wanted both.

  5 issued in 2015 by the DAI Working Group (composed of representatives from SURF, KNAW/DANS, Royal University Groningen, Tilburg University, TU Delft, the Dutch Royal Library, OCLC and Erasmus University Rotterdam) describes the implementation process for the DAI and explores the possible ways forward in the light of the arrival of new international alternatives for author identification such as VIAF, ISNI and ORCID and of the key changes in the research information management landscape in the Netherlands. A presentation 6 delivered later in the year by Niels van Dijk (SURFnet) and John Doove (SURFmarket) summarised the findings of the report above.

7

 7 released in 2021 by the Dutch Research Council (NWO, the main public research funder in the Netherlands) and SURF provides a roadmap for implementing a range of persistent identifiers -including Grant IDs and organisational IDs -to serve the needs of the research landscape from a research funder perspective. Not surprisingly, this roadmap does no longer include any reference to the DAIs, which have effectively been left behind by now.

The case of the DAI

Issues around risks and trust regarding the transition away from DAIs

Authorship