Technical and Human infrastructure for Open Research.

THOR – Technical and Human Infrastructure for Open Research

ORCID

Maaike Duine

Please join the THOR Project for a series of three webinars focusing on applications of persistent identifiers (PIDs). The first webinar will explain what PIDs are and why they are important. The second will dive a bit deeper, giving more insight into how to use PIDs and what services can be built on top of identifier systems.

Webinar Series: Persistent Identifiers: What, Why and How?

Australian National University

Amir Aryani

In the Research Graph project, we are connecting research data to publications, grants and researcher profiles. The core component is the Switchboard software [1] by the Research Data Alliance DDRI working group, and now this system has a new capability to exchange data with the VIVO platform. The group has received significant input from Dryad, DataCite, CERN, ANDS and other THOR project partners.

Research Graph &amp; VIVO Interoperability enabled by persistent identifiers

European Organization for Nuclear Research

Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen

Open Science needs incentives. Tracking data and software citation can be one of them. To facilitate that, THOR strives to improve the usage of persistent identifiers for all scholarly objects. Tracking citations has proven difficult since there has been little reuse so far, but a first step in that direction can be improving the visibility and findability of data and software.

Reuse of Research Data: The Shape of Things to Come

Josh Brown

The THOR project team are delighted to announce that the project final event will take place at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” in Rome, Italy, on November 15th 2017. Come and join us in the Eternal City to learn about how we have advanced the state of the art in persistent identifiers.

Save the date! THOR Final Event: 15 November 2017

DataCite

Martin Fenner

A few weeks ago there was an excellent post on the datacite blog by Martin Fenner. We’ve reproduced it below:  In the first post of the Datacite blog I talked about Data-Driven Development, and that service monitoring is an important aspect of this. The main service DataCite is providing is registration of digital object identifiers (DOIs) for scholarly content, in particular research data.

Digging into DataCite Metadata using R

Laura Rueda

Immediately before the start of the Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary session, on the 21st September, DataCite and EPIC are organising a half-day event to discuss how Persistent Identifiers can meet the challenges presented by data intensive research.

Persistent Identifiers: Enabling Services for Data Intensive Research

University of Bremen

Markus Stocker

Researchers demand credit for the work that they do. While there are well established practices and services in place to give credit for traditional publications, these are sorely lacking for the full range of research artefacts, including data and software. THOR partners have been busy developing data claiming services.

Giving Credit for Data with Claiming Services

Robert Petryszak

THOR Disciplinary Workshop Series, part II

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is a centre for research and services in bioinformatics. It performs basic research in computational biology and offers an extensive user training programme, supporting researchers in academia and industry. EMBL-EBI is part of EMBL, Europe’s flagship laboratory for the life sciences, and houses a diverse range of data repositories.

Data Claims to ORCID: an EMBL-EBI Perspective

British Library

Kirstie Hewlett

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are increasingly embedded in the services that researchers use every day, enabling unambiguous attribution of the full range of scholarly outputs. This makes it easier for data producers and researchers to get credit for their contributions; for data centres, universities and funders to track the impact of the research they facilitate; for publishers to incorporate data into scholarly writing;

Persistent Identifier Services for the Humanities

THOR Disciplinary Workshop Series, part IV

As part of the THOR project, we have been monitoring persistent identifier adoption across the research landscape. Preliminary analysis suggests that the humanities lag behind other fields. To explore the reasons why, we invited a group composed mostly of historians to a workshop at the British Library.

Xiaoli Chen

With local support from THOR ambassador Eva Mendez, the first edition of the THOR Bootcamp was successfully carried out in Madrid, at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid on November 16-18. The Bootcamp is part of THOR’s outreach effort to engage and train local scholarly communication communities to further adoption of PID services. The full set of slides used can be found on the THOR Knowledge Hub.

Hasta la Vista, THOR Bootcamp

Scientific research infrastructures collect large quantities of values. Values are typically numbers that result from observation, experiment, or computing activities. For instance, plant scientists collect values that result from observing fluxes of carbon dioxide on the leaf-atmosphere boundary; high-energy physicists collect values that result from observing collisions of atomic particles;

Identifying Interpretation

Tom Demeranville

Would you like to help others enjoy the full power of persistent identifiers?  A core component of the THOR project is two-way community involvement and with that in mind we’re happy to be launching the THOR project Ambassador Programme. THOR ambassadors will help shape the way we look at the persistent identifier landscape, influence new services, and help us understand where we are doing well and where we could do better.

The THOR Ambassador Programme is GO!

On Thursday July 7 2016, project THOR organised the workshop: Identifiers – Infrastructure, Impact and Innovation to showcase the research and work done by all THOR partners during the project’s first year. The event in Amsterdam attracted a mixed audience of representatives from publishing companies, universities and research institutions.

Highlights Workshop: Identifiers – Infrastructure, Impact and Innovation

On April 17, as part of FORCE 2016 in Portland Oregon, Crossref, and THOR partners DataCite and ORCID convened a workshop to discuss the current state of the art in organisation identifiers. We discussed this issue previously in a post on the ORCID blog, and we’re pleased to report back to you all that the workshop was a big success.

Organisation IDs for scholarly communications: where next?

Come and join us at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” in Rome, Italy, on November 15th 2017 to learn about how we have advanced the state of the art in persistent identifiers. You will find out about how THOR partners have developed new tools to connect identifiers across systems, to link people, datasets, samples, reactions and more.

THOR Final Event programme is out!

Register now for THOR Final Event in Rome, 15 November 2017!

Magyarország!

We are happy to announce that the THOR Bootcamp tour bus is on its way to Budapest! On September 28 and 29th, the next and final event of the series will be hosted in collaboration with our friends at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (DataCite member and ORCID integrator), taking place on its campus by the bank of river Danube, overlooking the magnificent Széchenyi Chain Bridge.

THOR Bootcamp in Budapest

THOR – ENVRIplus Bootcamp

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#ENVRiD: Integrating ORCID iDs in Environmental Research Infrastructures

THOR’s Project Coordinator Adam Farquhar (British Library) recently delivered a keynote at Our Digital Future. The conference, which was held in Cambridge on 14−15 March 2016, addressed challenges in long term preservation and archiving of digital data across a wide range of disciplines. His talk, titled “Diamonds are forever.

Diamonds are forever. What about research data?

Warning: This is a technical post aimed at developers and integrators.  That said, even if you’re non technical, you’ll be able to use the docs and explore the API to see what’s possible.  They’re really easy to work with. At first glance, most REST APIs are a bit confusing.  REST is an architectural style, not a specification and people do things differently.

Interactive API docs for ORCID

THOR Disciplinary Workshop Series, part I

The High-Energy Physics (HEP) community is one out of four disciplinary communities that are in the focus of THOR. When it comes to addressing specific challenges within scholarly communication and Open Science in these communities, disciplinary workshops have proven to be a very effective tool to agree on community specific actions.

High-Energy Physics: how special are we?

Date: June 20, 2017


 Time: 16.00-17.00 CET


 Register here.

THOR’s goal is to connect researchers, data and articles through persistent identifier services. Who is already using these services? And where? What are the factors that affect uptake? If we have better information about gaps and successes in PID adoption, we will be able to create better services.

THOR Webinar: PID use across regions and disciplines

Robin Dasler

THOR’s approach to sustainability relies on our partners taking on the THOR outputs as part of their regular business activities. This means that these outputs will need to be folded into their operations and will need to be sustained by their regular business models.

Interim business plan for sustaining the THOR federated PID infrastructure and services

If November taught us anything, it’s that open identifiers clearly do deserve their own festival. On 9

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and 10

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November 2016, people from all over the world gathered in Reykjavik to share PID stories, demos, use cases, victories, horror stories, and new frontiers at PIDapalooza, the first conference dedicated to PIDs.

THOR at PIDapalooza

On October 13, we held a webinar for our ambassadors to update them on recent THOR activities. Tom Demeranville explained more about ORCID integrations at the THOR disciplinary partners, ORCID Work Identifier types and other recent technological developments, such as Datacite’s Event Data and ORCID Auto Update. A preview of what THOR is planning for the remainder of 2016 and in 2017 was given by Josh Brown.

THOR Ambassador Update

Rachael Kotarski

The International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) is an annual get together exploring all-things thesis and PhD research. I was there to present a poster on how THOR is developing improved support for identifiers in the British Library’s thesis service, EThOS.

Persistent IDs and Theses: ETD2016, Lille

On Thursday February 25th project THOR organised a workshop about the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) within the biosciences community at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK. EMBL-EBI are a THOR partner, and the event drew a capacity crowd. Team members from ORCID EU and EBI gave presentations on the scope and future of ORCID and the use of ORCID iDs and Research Object Identifiers (ROIs) at EBI.

THOR Workshop at the European Bioinformatics Institute, UK

On Thursday March 17, 3pm-4pm CET, OpenAIRE, THOR, Datacite, and ORCID will organise a one hour webinar on data – article linking services. Project OpenAIRE aims to support the implementation of Open Science in Europe and will demonstrate during the webinar how they collaborate with DataCite and CrossRef to establish a sustainable e-infrastructure for researchers.

Webinar Data – Article linking services

Adèniké Deane-Pratt

The ongoing drive within the THOR project to identify and connect the research landscape reached Warsaw on Monday 24 April.

PIDs in Poland: let’s link research!

CERN is a hub for all things High-Energy Physics (or HEP for short). Nearly all researchers in the HEP field make CERN their home for all or part of their research careers. Most of these researchers maintain separate university affiliations as well, making the CERN research community a distributed decentralized global network.

ORCID Integration Series: CERN

Project THOR is coming to a close. Our final event was held in Italy on 15 November at ‘La Sapienza’ – the University of Rome – just a stone’s throw from Michelangelo’s impressive sculpture of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The day combined a retrospective review of THOR’s achievements and impact with a forward-looking perspective on the wider persistent identifier (PID) landscape.

THOR’s last hurrah

Part of knowing how well THOR is doing is knowing how our work fits into the overall context of persistent identifiers (PIDs) at large. This is why we began the project with an eye toward sustainability and also why we developed the metrics dashboard in the early days of the project.

Assessing the PID Landscape: Where is THOR in Context?

THOR is a joint project, with 10 partners from across the research ecosystem. THOR will run for 30 months, and has been funded by the European Commission under call H2020-EINFRA-2014-2, project number 654039.

THOR at a glance

This blog post by Martin Fenner has been cross-posted from the DataCite blog. On July 12, 2016, DataCite invited Andreas Rauber to present the recommendations for dynamic data citation of the RDA Data Citation Working Group in a webinar. Andreas is one of the co-chairs of the RDA working group, and he gave a throughout overview of the recommendations, and the thinking that went into them.

Dynamic Data Citation Webinar

A THOR-ENVRIplus Bootcamp   Are you working in a technical or leading role within an Environmental Research Infrastructure? Join us at Aalto University in Finland on March 28-29, 2017 to learn more about ORCID integrations and discuss best practices with colleagues from other Environmental Research Infrastructures. Project THOR supports seamless integration between articles, data and researchers across the research lifecycle.

ORCID Integrations in Environmental Research Infrastructures

Bootcamp the THOR en Madrid(Spanish version below)  Want to learn more about Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and how to harness their potential to advance your work? THOR is launching its first Bootcamp in Madrid at UC3M on 17-18 November. We will look at topics like PID service integration, research data management, and research output compliance/ impact tracking – bring your questions and let’s crack them together.

THOR Bootcamp in Madrid

This is the first in a series of posts describing how THOR partners have recently integrated ORCID in their disciplinary data repositories. This post describes ORCID integration in PANGAEA, the Data Publisher for Earth &amp; Environmental Science. PANGAEA is rolling out a new version of its website. Developers and designers are currently ironing out a few remaining open issues. The release is expected for autumn 2016.

ORCID Integration Series: PANGAEA

The THOR Project is looking for an early-career library science specialist to work with our team at CERN on the forefront of Open Science services for the High Energy Physics community, focusing on persistent identifiers and metadata requirements. As a large scale scientific laboratory, CERN produces research data in high volume and demands sophisticated data management and preservation efforts.

THOR is Hiring

(cross posted from the Datacite blog)  One of the first tasks for DataCite in the European Commission-funded THOR project that started in June was to contribute to a comparison of the ORCID and DataCite metadata standards.

Differences between ORCID and DataCite Metadata

Key to achieving THOR’s mission is building capacity to increase the use of persistent identifiers. To establish a sustainable e-infrastructure, we need to make sure we are reaching as many people as possible so the entire research community will see the advantages of integrated and interoperable PID systems.

Growing number of THOR ambassadors! Join us!

Following the release of the THOR dashboard last year, conversations with internal users, stakeholders and even the project’s reviewers have highlighted additional data and features that might serve to make the dashboard more comprehensive for the wider PID community. At the same time, available resources have changed, and THOR’s own interests have evolved as the project has progressed.

Release Note for the THOR Dashboard

Patricia Herterich

This is a guest blog post by THOR ambassador Patricia Herterich. Patricia is the Research Repository Advisor at the University of Birmingham Library and a PhD candidate at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science.

Getting the message to academics: promoting ORCID on a university campus

A range of European and global initiatives is under way to support research practices and sharing in the digital era.

EU Projects Collaboration Meeting – Events and Communications

Would you like to learn more about persistent identifiers, data-article linking, integration services, dynamic data citation, and much more? And how these interoperable research services will lead to opportunities for innovation and foster open science?

July 7, 2016 THOR Workshop: Identifiers – Infrastructure, Impact and Innovation

This guest blog post has been written by Mieneke van der Salm, Information Specialist at Leiden University Libraries in the Netherlands and has been cross-posted from The Connected Leiden Researcher. On June 22, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) organised an information session on the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) and its benefits and uses.

ORCID at Leiden University

The third and final edition of the THOR Bootcamp will start in 3 weeks in the beautiful city Budapest. We gathered PID experts from THOR project partner organizations, Library and Information Centre of Hungarian Academy of Science, Centre for Social Sciences of Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the University of Debrecen, to bring a full agenda for our participants.

Putting PIDs to the test at Bootcamp Budapest

Angela Dappert

In November 2015 the “eInfrastructure” Unit at the European Commission Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology asked several e-Infrastructure providers to develop a framework for a service portfolio to describe services developed with funding from the directorate. The THOR project participated in the definition of the concepts underlying such a portfolio. The resulting framework can be found here.

THOR and the EC Catalogue of Services Framework

Researchers need to be linked to their data. Within THOR, we’ve been busy developing approaches to support the inclusion of ORCID iDs in disciplinary data repositories and data publication workflows.

ORCID Integration in Disciplinary Data Repositories

Earlier this year, the H2020 projects THOR and ENVRIplus joined forces and organised a bootcamp focusing on integrating ORCID in environmental research infrastructures. The bootcamp was inspired by the ORCID integrations carried out by THOR partners earlier in the project. Persistent identifiers, including ORCID iDs, are important elements of any research infrastructure.

Fostering Synergies Among Research Projects: THOR and ENVRIplus

This blog post by Laura Rueda has been cross-posted from the DataCite Blog. Passionate as we are about persistent identifiers, we are delighted to invite you to PIDapalooza, the festival of PIDs this November in Reykjavik.

PIDapalooza, the festival of persistent identifiers is coming soon!

Florian Graef

In this third blog post we introduce you to the  EBI ORCID Hub we developed as part of the THOR project at EMBL-EBI, to integrate ORCID iDs into life science databases.

ORCID Integration Series: EMBL-EBI

Today I am pleased to announce the launch of a new service, DataCite Labs Search – the service is available immediately athttp://search.labs.datacite.org/. This is one of THOR’s first services and is based on work in the earlier EC-funded ODIN Project.  The ODIN project launched the DataCite/ORCID claiming tool in June 2013. The DataCite/ORCID claiming tool allows users to add works from the DataCite Metadata Store (MDS) to their ORCID profile.

From Pilot to Service

This has been cross-posted on the ORCID blog.

The THOR team is hard at work helping forge the path to sustainable persistent identifier (PID) services. As with any long-term goal, a bit of self-reflection is helpful for tracking your progress, considering your successes, and psyching yourself up to tackle challenges along the way.

Challenges of Measuring PID Adoption

Crossref/THOR Outreach Meeting, Warsaw, Poland

 Monday, 24 April 2017


 Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences

This outreach meeting aims to explore how the research community can work together to help connect research and improve discoverability of content – publications, data and more.

Much more than infrastructure: working together to connect research

THOR Disciplinary Workshop Series, part III

On June 12, PANGAEA held a short workshop on ORCID and its integration in PANGAEA at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Science at the University of Bremen. As a Data Publisher in Earth and Environmental Sciences, PANGAEA operates an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research.

Credit for Data with ORCID: Raising Awareness in Earth and Environmental Sciences

The Force11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles highlight the importance of giving scholarly credit to all contributors:  The EC-funded THOR project that DataCite is involved in addresses these issues, and I have summarized the findings of one of our first reports in aprevious blog post.

Contributor Information in DataCite Metadata

THOR is pleased to announce the launch of a new dashboard tool. Our dashboard will monitor the evolution of the persistent identifier (PID) landscape over the life of the THOR project.

Monitor the Identifier Landscape with the THOR Dashboard

The THOR project has officially launched! THOR  (Technical and Human infrastructure for Open Research) will build on the services provided by ORCID and DataCite to ensure that every researcher, at any phase of their career, or at any institution, will have seamless and free access to Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for their research artefacts and their work will be uniquely attributed to them.

The next step for open science: a state-of-the-art identifier network

Kristian Garza

The last week of September 2016, several THOR partners headed to the city of churches, Krakow, to participate in the Digital Infrastructures for Research conference (DI4R). DI4R was an event organised by Europe’s leading e-infrastructures, EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Europe, in which researchers, developers and service providers brainstormed and discussed adoption of digital infrastructure services and

THOR at Digital Infrastructures for Research

We’re really excited to announce the upcoming soft-launch of the THOR knowledge hub. A skeleton resource at the moment, the knowledge hub will evolve into the first point of call for information about persistent identifiers. We’d love to show you what we’ve built so far, share our plans for the hub and gather your feedback, suggestions and contributions.

Knowledge hub set to soft-launch, join our webinar on January 28th!

Robert Huber

An article co-authored by one of the THOR partners was recently published by the Earth Science Informatics  journal.  Although written from a geo-domain perspective it contains much that can be applied to more general cases.

DOI for geoscience data – how early practices shape present perceptions

As you may recall from the Knowledge Exchange Workshop presentation, the work of THOR is composed of several strands: Research, Integration, Outreach, and Sustainability. That last strand, Sustainability, fits with our overall theme of persistence.

Sustainability: Key to THOR’s Success

THOR was part of a presentation last week in Melbourne. The occasion was a seminar on Identifiers and Linked data in the research space hosted by OCLC at  Latrobe University.

Identifiers and Linked data in the research space seminar

Researcher Identifiers – National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation   Members of the THOR team spent Monday and Tuesday attending the “Researcher Identifiers – National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation” workshop in London. The workshop focused on person identifiers, with the bulk of discussion about the use of ORCID, CRIS systems, ISNI, federated identity and organisational identifiers.

Knowledge Exchange Workshop

Adam Farquhar

It has been a year since THOR launched in June 2015 and a natural time to take stock of what the project has achieved and some of the ways that our understanding has matured. In the THOR vision, persistent identifiers are the default. They are the new normal. And they are interlinked and embedded in the services that researchers use every day.