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PIDapalooza 2020: Highlights from the Fourth Festival of PIDs

Last month, PIDapalooza rocked the world again! The fourth festival of persistent identifiers, which took place in Lisbon, featured a Portuguese classical guitarist, a Japanese nail artist, an interpretive dance about the scientific process, several uses of beach balls, silly hats and bells, the latest version of the fabulous PIDapalooza playlist and, of course, the lighting of the eternal flame!

There it is, the eternal flame of persistence is turned on thanks to its supporters 🔥 #PIDapalooza2020 @ORCID_Org @datacite @CrossrefOrg @CalDigLib pic.twitter.com/1ZnaqbAZYe

— Mohammad Hosseini (@mhmd_hosseini) January 29, 2020

The festival lineup in Lisbon was impressive, with more than 40 different sessions from expert speakers who shared their PID successes and challenges, presented their visions for PID connections and PID communities, and introduced new PIDs on the block, all while discussing these serious topics in a range of interactive and engaging formats.

Not to mention the festival headliners: three inspiring keynote speakers…

First up was Maria Fernanda Rollo, Associate Professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her talk, Towards the Circular Science: PIDs for a New Generation of Knowledge Creation and Management Paradigm in Portugal — from Vision to Reality, focused on her experience as Portugal’s former Secretary of State for Science, Technology, and Higher Education. As the person responsible for developing their national strategy for open science, Maria’s priority was more science, less bureaucracy — not as simple as it sounds! Democratization, efficiency, and transparency were key to the Portuguese PID policy, which included developing Estudante IDs for students and Ciencia IDs for everyone involved in science.

The second keynote, The Science Ecosystem and Open Science: A Multi-Legged Stool, was delivered by Beth Plale, program officer at the US National Science Foundation, working on open science, and a Professor in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University – Bloomington. Like Maria, Beth highlighted both the benefits and the challenges of open science, but her focus was primarily on data. She encouraged us to think about treating different kinds of digital content differently — for example, suggesting that not all data needs to be kept forever. And she noted that although “there’s a [PID] brain trust in this room,” most people don’t understand and/or care about identifiers; there’s a lot of work to be done on that front!

Last, but very definitely not least, was the closing keynote, Kathryn Kaiser, Assistant Professor and Scientist in the Office of Energetics at the University of Alabama – Birmingham. Her talk was entitled Dancing with the Scientists: The Costs of Piddling with Science without PIDs. In a festival-inspired mix of music, animation, and interpretive dance (yes, featuring a unicorn-themed beach ball), not to mention some memorable analogies — cheese as a metaphor for metadata, fishing as a metaphor for systematic reviews — Kathryn shared her pain, her struggles, her data, and her hopes as a researcher doing systematic review work in nutrition and obesity topics and relying on quality data infrastructure.

We are definitely all awake and energized after this fun start to @KatKaiserPhD’s keynote #PIDapalooza2020 😀 pic.twitter.com/SFw6A4nnQh

— PIDapalooza (@pidapalooza) January 30, 2020

#PIDapalooza2020 was the largest-ever gathering in the festival’s four years, with about 175 participants from around the globe, many attending for the first time.

And that’s a wrap! Farewell #PIDapalooza2020 & farewell Lisbon! Thanks to everyone for being such a great crowd – see you again for #PIDapalooza2021 in ….??? (But not Wyoming. Sorry Wyoming.) pic.twitter.com/0NIAbaLvCD

— PIDapalooza (@pidapalooza) January 30, 2020

When we asked festival attendees (*in a very scientific poll*) whether we had rocked their world this year, the answer was a resounding “Hell, yeah!”

We also asked you if #PIDapalooza2020 rocked your world. And yeah, hell yeah it did (apart from a handful of grumpy people)! pic.twitter.com/JAdcMu400l

— PIDapalooza (@pidapalooza) January 30, 2020

It is clear from attendee feedback that PIDapalooza is truly a unique event, bringing together a specialized community to discuss important topics in a friendly and inclusive setting. Some highlights from the 2020 festival in their words:

It was an incredibly positive and productive event! I appreciated the ability to connect with the leading experts in the PID community. It is a testament to the meeting that it draws a braintrust like this.

[I liked] That all keynote speakers were women! But also the rather “informal” approach (taking yourself not too seriously while taking the work seriously).

The range of parallel talks means that you can really tailor your conference experience. It can be totally different from the journey your colleagues and friends experience, and you can share what you have learned over delicious canapés in a rainy city!

There’s a wonderful community feel – everyone is interested in sharing, learning, and having conversations during breaks. It’s amazing to have the leading PID folks in one place!

This is the best meeting to attend for the work I do.

It will soon be time to start thinking about the next PIDapalooza — the fifth! We’re already thinking about using that important anniversary as an opportunity to experiment — with the format, the location, or both — as well as continuing to build on all the things people love about the event.

In the meantime, whether or not you were in Lisbon yourself, you can experience or revisit #PIDapalooza2020 on Twitter and through the presentations available on the PIDapalooza 2020 community page on Zenodo.

Post contributed by the PIDapalooza 2020 organizing committee: Ana Afonso (FCT), Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Ginny Hendricks and Maria Sullivan (Crossref). Special thanks to Alice Meadows (NISO) for editorial support. 

Introducing the FAIR Island Project

Imagine a dream scenario for Open Data advocates: the field station with an optimal data policy for open access, mandatory registration requirements for all research projects, and data management plans containing controlled vocabularies and identifiers implementing global standards wherever possible. A research institution where all researchers are required to create data management plans (DMPs) for all research conducted at the station and said DMPs are updated as data collection advances. Harnessing the opportunities presented in such a FAIR data utopia, could we build a model system that allows data to be fed across stakeholder systems, linking metadata, repositories and stakeholders and allowing for notifications and verification?

Introducing FAIR Island 

Building on the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Consortium (see Davies et al. 2016), FAIR Island leverages collaboration between the University of California Gump Station, located on Moorea in French Polynesia, and Tetiaroa Society, which operates a newly established field station located on the atoll of Tetiaroa, a short distance from Moorea. 

Tetiaroa is in a unique position to demonstrate how we can advance open science by creating optimal FAIR data policies governing all research conducted at the field station. By implementing mandatory registration requirements including extensive use of controlled vocabularies, personal identifiers (PIDs), and other identifiers, DMPs in this environment will be utilized as key documents for tracking provenance, attribution, compliance, deposit, and publication of all research data collected on the island. 

Our primary goal is to develop the optimal data policies and technical infrastructure necessary to create an environment where all data and knowledge collected on Tetiaroa is curated and made openly available as quickly as possible. Longer term, our hope is to extend the policies and infrastructure developed in this partnership to other field stations including those administered by University of California (e.g., through the UC Natural Reserve System). The research community on Tetiaroa is international (France/EU, NZ, UK, US, …) and connects across many scientific networks, thus contributing to the advancement of open science on a global scale.

Our Approach

The invasive, non-native rats present on Tetiaroa provide an initial focal point for our project. Researchers on the island are currently collecting data in advance of a massive rat eradication project and will follow up with additional studies once the species has been removed. These data sets taken together offer the opportunity to examine the ecological responses, across the coupled marine and terrestrial environments, that occur when you remove a keystone species from an ecosystem. The FAIR Island project will utilize the rat eradication project as a real life example from which to map out the data management policies and processes that are required to accelerate the rate at which multidisciplinary data are being collected, released, and made available for reuse. 

The FAIR Island project examines the impact of implementing optimal research data management policies and requirements, affording us the unique opportunity to look at the outcomes of strong data policies at a working field station. It also offers a  real-world example to prove the capabilities of machine-actionable data management plans (maDMPs) and to analyse the downstream effects of these policies in the resulting release of data. Our goal is to translate the broader FAIR principles into a set of specific requirements and implementable activities that demonstrate how good data management practices and policies accelerate research for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Some questions guiding our work include: 

How to get involved 

Neil Davies, Executive Director of the Gump South Pacific Research Station and VP Science Director of Tetiaroa Society, and Maria Praetzellis, Product Manager of Research Data Management at CDL will be presenting on the project during the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 15th Plenary Meeting in March of 2020. Please join us if you’ll be at RDA or send us an email to meet up at RDA to learn more about the project.

We are also in the process of assembling a data advisory group to provide expertise and guidance regarding the formation of new data policies and corresponding procedures supporting FAIR Island. If you are interested in learning more about this opportunity please reach out and we are happy to share details. 

As always, all questions, comments, or advice are welcome: maria.praetzellis@ucop.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!