Recommendation to

Status:

[shortened from below]

IGSN is used to identify samples in data infrastructures.

For organizations this means:

• a person or unit should be made responsible to maintain the centres IGSNs.

For data curators this means:

• Enable, train and encourage staff to register IGSN when samples are taken.
• Enable, train and encourage staff to record any parent IGSNs with subsamples.

For researchers it means:

• Record an IGSN with any sample taken.
• Record the parent IGSN with any subsample measured

For data infrastructures:

• record a IGSN to identify samples and parent samples and make this data part of the metadata available for harvesting.
• treat IGSN metadata as the primary source of truth and update your own metadata accordingly.

Parent:

Dependent:

Other: none

Names of contributors to this recommendation

[1] Plankytė, Vaida, Macneil, Rory, & Chen, Xiaoli. (2023). Guiding principles for implementing persistent identification and metadata features on research tools to boost interoperability of research data and support sample management workflows. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8284206

About

History and structure

Current Use of …

Motivation

(quality of content, limitations, interoperability, sustainability: expected future dissemination / technical availability / funding)

IGSN is used to identify samples in data infrastructures.

For organizations this means:

• a person or unit should be made responsible to maintain the centres IGSNs.

For data curators this means:

• Enable, train and encourage staff to register IGSN when samples are taken.
• Enable, train and encourage staff to record any parent IGSNs with subsamples.

For researchers it means:

• Record an IGSN with any sample taken.
• Record the parent IGSN with any subsample measured

For data infrastructures:

• record a IGSN to identify samples and parent samples and make this data part of the metadata available for harvesting.
• treat IGSN metadata as the primary source of truth and update your own metadata accordingly.

Also see [3] Baldewein et al. (2023). FAIR WISH D7 -Standard Operating Procedure for automatic IGSN registration. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10401380

IGSN is implemented within the Helmholtz association at AWI, GFZ, and Hereon through the FAIRWish Project [4]. See [3] for more information.

Another implementation is documented at the Kiel University (CAU) [6]

[1] Plankytė, Vaida, Macneil, Rory, & Chen, Xiaoli. (2023). Guiding principles for implementing persistent identification and metadata features on research tools to boost interoperability of research data and support sample management workflows. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8284206

[2] Klump, J., Lehnert, K., Ulbricht, D., Devaraju, A., Elger, K., Fleischer, D., Ramdeen, S., Wyborn, L. (2021): Towards Globally Unique Identification of Physical Samples: Governance and Technical Implementation of the IGSN Global Sample Number. - Data Science Journal, 20, 1, 1-16., DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-033

[3] Baldewein, L., Kleeberg, U., Brauser, A., Elger, K., Frenzel, S., Heim, B., & Wieczorek, M. (2023). FAIR WISH D7 - Standard Operating Procedure for automatic IGSN registration. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10401380

[4] The FAIR Wish Project: https://helmholtz-metadaten.de/de/inf-projects/fair-wish-fair-workflows-to-establish-igsn-for-samples-in-the-helmholtz-association

[5] IGSN Documentation on forschungsdaten.org https://www.forschungsdaten.org/index.php/IGSN

[6] IGSN Service and Documentation at the University Kiel https://igsn.uni-kiel.de/de