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Job Opening: UC3 Product Manager (EZID) / Research Data Specialist

California Digital Library (CDL) has built a strong portfolio of innovative projects and initiatives concerned with promoting the use of persistent identifiers throughout the scholarly communication ecosystem. Our work has ranged from experimentation and thought leadership to global PID service offerings.

As the home of the ARK standard and the N2T resolver, as well as institutional members of DataCite, Crossref, and ORCID, CDL is dedicated to innovating and sustaining the social and technical infrastructure that enables the open sharing and publication of all legitimate research outputs. This dedication has manifested in our work on data citations, DOIs for data, DOIs for publications, ARKs, ORCiDs, YAMZ, compact identifiers, organizational identifiers, data metrics, PID events, and more.

The centerpiece of these efforts is EZID, a service that makes persistent identifiers easy. Since it started, EZID has grown into an internationally recognizable brand with partners around the globe, including representatives from academia, government, nonprofit and commercial sectors. Last August, the EZID program began to transition non-UC DOI services. This is done to focus our community’s time and resources back to DataCite and Crossref (as community infrastructure organizations) and free up resources within CDL for new PID projects. We now are looking for ways to leverage this capacity and our expertise in the PID space.

Now Hiring

With the upcoming retirement of Joan Starr, we are looking for an experienced product manager to direct strategic planning, open source development, and community partnerships that will further enhance and extend CDL’s strategic leadership in scholarly PIDs. This is an exciting opportunity to evaluate the potential for innovation, develop a compelling plan for how best to position CDL as an agent for positive change, and truly impact the PID landscape.

Next steps

If you are excited by this opportunity, we hope you will apply. The position reports into the Director of the University of California Curation Center (UC3), CDL’s digital curation program. UC3 is also home to CDL’s systems and initiatives supporting digital preservation, data publishing, research data management, and data skills training for librarians. Additional information on this position is available here: https://jobs.ucop.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=61143.

RFI for organizational identifier registry

Organizations/institutions are a key part of the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, we lack an openly licensed, independently run organizational identifier standard to use for common affiliation and citation use cases.

To define a solution to this problem, a group of interested parties drafted and shared a proposal at last year’s PIDapalooza. Based on that discussion, earlier this year Crossref, DataCite and ORCID announced the formation of an Organization Identifier Working Group and UC3 has supported this effort by our Director, John Chodacki, serving as chair of the Working Group.

Scope of Work

The primary goal of our working group (loosely codenamed OrgID or Open PIIR – Open Persistent Institutional Identifier Registry) is to build a plan for how to best fill this gap and our main uses were to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

The working group used a series of breakout groups to refine the structure, principles, and technology specifications for an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry. We worked in three interdependent areas: Governance, Product Definition, and Business Model, and recently released for public comment our findings and recommendations for governance and product requirements.

Summary of findings & recommendations

After 9 months, the recommendations are the creation of an open, independent organization/institution identifier registry:

with capabilities for organizations/institutions to manage their own record,
seeded with and using open data,
overseen by an independent governance structure, and
incubated within a non-profit host organization/institution (providing technical development, operations and other support) during its initial start-up phase.

Request for Information

Our working group has now issued a Request for Information (RFI) to solicit comment and to hear from groups interested in hosting and/or developing this registry.

Are you interested in serving as a the start-up host organziation?
Do you have organization data you are willing to contribute?
Do you have other resources that could be helpful for the project?
Do you have advice, suggestions, and feedback on creating a sustainable business model for each phase of the Registry’s development?

We’d like to hear from you! Please help spread the word!

Before drafting responses, please also see our original A Way Forward document for additional framing principles. Also, please note that all responses will be reviewed by a subgroup of the Organization Identifier Working Group (that will exclude any RFI respondents).

Update: revised November 1, 2017

As posted above, the working group issued a Request for Information (RFI) on 9 October 2017 to solicit comment and interest from the broader research community in developing the Registry. We have received a number of questions about the RFI. The purpose of this post is to clarify the RFI, the process for reviewing responses, and the next steps for developing the registry. Please use this template to respond to the RFI.

(1) When are the responses due?

We have extended the deadline for responses to 1 December 2017.

(2) Who should be responding?

Any organization interested in (i) providing open data, (ii) participating in a governance role, (iii) serving as technical and/or administrative host for the Registry organization , and / or (iv) providing technology, staffing, or marketing resources.

(3) How much detail should the response include?

A general description of your interest (see (2) above), and a short description of the resources you could bring to the Registry will suffice. We are not requesting a detailed cost proposal. While framing your responses, please see the Governance and Product documents for requirements and principles. Please use this template to respond to the RFI.

(4) How will the responses be reviewed?

Responses will be received by the Organization Identifier Steering Group. In early December, they will develop a summary and list of respondents to share with the full Working Group and the Executive Committees of Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID boards for review. We propose a meeting of stakeholders in late January, potentially the day before the PIDapalooza meeting, to discuss options with the respondents for a collaborative approach to developing the Registry. From there, next steps will be proposed.

(6) Who do I contact if I have more questions?

Please email the Org ID steering group with any questions. Or, if you have any other questions/comments about the involvement of CDL’s UC3 team, let us know at uc3@ucop.edu