Josh Brown
Co-founder, Research and Strategy, MoreBrains Cooperative
Australian organisations have been leaders in the support and adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs). In globally challenging times, we depend on accurate, timely dissemination of research results and activities more than ever. The same challenges make compelling demands on the public purse, requiring those delivering publicly funded research to do so efficiently. For this reason the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and Australian Access Federation (AAF) commissioned the MoreBrains Cooperative to investigate how PIDs can reduce administrative burden and increase efficiency in the Australian academic research sector.
The three main benefits of PIDs are:
- Metadata reuse: PID registries store metadata, and provide programmatic access to it, saving the time and effort of rekeying it, and improving accuracy
- Automation: The presence of a PID in a system or a metadata record can trigger for an action, saving time but also offering more complete information and more timely information processing
- Aggregation and analysis: At the institutional or national scale, aggregating information about entities and the relationships between them enables strategic analysis, benchmarking, the plotting of trends, and a host of other insights
Focusing on the first of these, we found that the time cost of metadata entry is nearly 38,000 person days per year with a direct financial cost of nearly $24 million per year.
Based on our research, we offer recommendations for a strategy to maximise these benefits and analyse the steps the Australian eResearch community could take to deliver them to every institution and researcher.
Biography
Josh Brown is a co-founder and the research and strategy lead for MoreBrains Cooperative, a group of research ecosystem experts working to bring resilience and efficiency to the world of open research. He has worked for Jisc, CERN, ORCID and Crossref in a variety of roles, and is a passionate advocate for openness and transparency in research.