Participant Perspectives | Cameron Neylon, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative
Cameron Neylon, Curtin University
Please explain a little about your background and why you’re interested in persistent identifier (PID) metadata and its enrichment.
I'm interested in evidence about how research and innovation works, and the role that openness can play. Within the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) we have built up a large scale evidence base using open data from multiple sources. Just a few years ago data integration was hard or impossible, but the increasing availability of PIDs has made it possible and, where the PIDs are well curated, even easy.
This makes old kinds of analysis easier, but more importantly, new kinds of analysis possible. We can bring multiple data sources together, either to create a more complete view, or to validate them against each other. We can combine disparate data sources at large scales and ask new types of questions.
All of this is enabled by PIDs and the more complete, the more accurate and the more reliable they are, the more of this work we can do.
What excites you most about the potential for collaborative enrichment of PID metadata (e.g. to improve research discoverability, impact tracking, better reflect the global nature of scholarly communications)? What do you think will be the most challenging aspect to address?
For me, it is being able to scale our view of the world up and out. We are missing so much of the world's research activity at the moment. There will never be a single system for tracking everything. But where we have common points of reference, like PIDs we can bring data from different geographies or systems together.
The other key part for me is that collaborative enrichment can scale out to a global level. The expertise on whether a metadata record is correct or accurate is local. We need mechanisms for surfacing and collecting that local insight. We've already reached breaking point for centralised correction and curation of this data. We need ways to work collaboratively so that all enrichments can be compatible.
The biggest challenge then becomes authority and trust. Unfortunately in today's world we need to build with the assumption that bad actors will seek to undermine or poison the data, or distribute misinformation. A truly global system that signals where an enrichment comes from, and allows contextualised, granular and local decision making about which enrichments to trust is going to be a major challenge.
What successful examples of community collaboration in scholarly infrastructure have you witnessed that could inform the proposed COMET model’s development?
I think the development of ROR is one good example to look at. ROR addresses many of these problems for the specific case of identifying organisations and is an example of balancing the need for shared governance but also agility. We should also look at failed efforts and see how we can learn those lessons. The big challenge is finding ways to work that can be globally inclusive, without simply imposing a western solution. I believe that PIDs have the potential to help address this, but there is also a lot of skepticism of existing PID systems we need to address.
How could better and more complete PID metadata, derived from the proposed COMET model, help to advance your goals, those of your organization, or your communities?
It gives us a bigger and more complete picture of what is happening in the world of research. When we shifted the COKI Open Access Website onto using OpenAlex as its main data source for affiliations, we saw 32 countries light up that we hadn't previously detected. Many of these countries showed high levels of open access, telling a different story about how scholarly publishing is evolving.
We tell many stories about how the research systems is evolving, and not all of these are actually supported by data. The more complete a picture we have, the more we can test our assumptions and think about what stories the evidence supports.
What benefits do you envision enriched PID metadata enrichments, such as is being aimed for through COMET, will have on the broader research ecosystem?
Ultimately, better research policy and strategy. So much of what we do today is based on a limited view of what research is, how it works, and what is being done. We can do better. At a smaller scale more flexibility and contextualisation for research evaluation, and more sophisticated tools that let people tell their own stories about research.
Why do you think organizations interested in PID metadata enrichment should consider contributing resources to fund the first phase of development for the proposed COMET model?
We need to work together to build a shared system of high quality metadata. We need the different perspectives that can come from varying use cases, geographies and organisations. Whether it is the time of expert staff, or resources to collate and coordinate the systems themselves, we should be working collectively. That will require a collective investment.