Resource Identification Initiative
From the webpage:
We are starting a pilot project, sponsored by the Neuroscience Information Framework and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, to address the issue of proper resource identification within the neuroscience (actually biomedical) literature. We have now christened this project the Resource Identification Initiative (hastag #RII) and expanded the scope beyond neuroscience. This project is designed to make it easier for researchers to identify the key resources (materials, data, tools) used to produce the scientific findings within a published study and to find other studies that used the same resources. It is also designed to make it easier for resource providers to track usage of their resources and for funders to measure impacts of resource funding. The requirements are that key resources are identified in such a manner that they are identified uniquely and are:
1) Machine readable;
2) Are available outside the paywall;
3) Are uniform across publishers and journals. We are seeking broad input from the FORCE11 community to ensure that we come up with a solution that represents the best thinking available on these topics.
The pilot project was an outcome of a meeting held at the NIH on Jun 26th. A draft report from the June 26th Resource Identification meeting at the NIH is now available. As the report indicates, we have preliminary agreements from journals and publishers to implement a pilot project. We hope to extend this project well beyond the neuroscience literature, so please join this group if you are interested in participating.
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Yes, another “unique identifier” project.
Don’t get me wrong, to the extent that a unique vocabulary can be developed and used, that’s great.
But it does not address:
- tools/techniques/data that existed before the unique vocabulary came into existence
- future tools/techniques/data that isn’t covered by the unique vocabulary
- mappings between old, current and future tool/techniques/data
The project is trying to address a real need in neuroscience journals (lack of robust identification of organisms or antibodies).
If you have the time and interest, it is a worthwhile project that needs to consider the requirements for “robust” identification.
Your concern is perfectly right. Robustness of unique product identifiers is one of the key problems of the whole industry. I personally think however, that this is not just another “unique identifier” project.
For the first time, commercial partners such as biocompare or us (see our support for the initiative at http://www.antibodies-online.com/resource-identification-initiative/) who both have long years of experience in managing product databases above 1 m entries with robuts identifiers and know the malaise of the industry are on board to help.
But please feel free to add more thoughts and suggestions – we will be glad to have your personal experience incorporated. You can always email me – I left my personal email upon registration.
Andreas Kessell
Co-Founder of http://www.antibodies-online.com
Comment by Andreas Kessell — February 3, 2014 @ 10:36 am
Andreas,
Good point about the commercial partners being part of the solution! And it is true that unique identifiers, assuming enough curation, can be extremely useful.
I will be in contact with you but to illustrate my concerns, consider the information that your partners have to take into consideration to map an “old” identifier to a new unique identifier. If that information were captured upon the authoring of the “old” identifier, how much easier would it be to collect, compare and then possibly map together the “old” identifiers to the new “unique” identifiers?
The other aspect of my concerns is the non-permanence of identifiers over time. Depending on the domain, some identifiers age faster than others. Granting that for practical purposes, one may wish to declare some set of identifiers for processing or user access, but that is an artifice and not the reality of identifiers.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 4, 2014 @ 10:26 am