[Status: Under development, Date: 2023-08-25, Version: 001]

The Helmholtz Association is determined to make their data available according to the FAIR principles, thus making it findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. In order to achieve interoperability of datasets among various data infrastructures (DIS) within the Helmholtz Association, a common and agreed procedure to refer to people within and across the DIS is needed.

In order to be able to uniquely and sustainably identify both researchers and employees in data infrastructures and repositories in the Helmholtz Association, the respective person should always be referenced with a persistent identifier (PID) (see recommendation M0).

For the Helmholtz Association we recommend to use ORCID to refer to people and contributors to resources in data infrastructures and repositories of the Helmholtz Association wherever possible (see recommendation M1.0).

To be able to implement this measure, several activities need to be conducted by different stakeholder groups. This recommendation M1.2. calls for activity of anyone contributing to data products.

It is recommended, that anyone contributing to data products should

1. register with ORCID if they haven’t done so already
2. keep their ORCID related metadata current and
3. share the relevant parts of this data with the center for use in the centers data systems in order to keep the information in the systems current.

Precondition 1: The ORCID Registry is available for all researchers, maintained and further developed.

Parent: 1.0

Dependent: none

Other: 1.1, 1.3

Emanuel Söding, Andrea Pörsch

Motivation

The Helmholtz Association is determined to make their data available according to the FAIR principles, thus making it findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. In order to achieve interoperability of datasets among various data infrastructures (DIS) within the Helmholtz Association, a common and agreed procedure to refer to people within and across the DIS is needed.

In order to be able to uniquely and sustainably identify both researchers and employees in data infrastructures and repositories in the Helmholtz Association, the respective person should always be referenced with a persistent identifier (PID) (see recommendation M0).

For the Helmholtz Association we recommend to use ORCID to refer to people and contributors to resources in data infrastructures and repositories of the Helmholtz Association wherever possible (see recommendation M1.0). To be able to implement this measure, several activities need to be conducted by different stakeholder groups. This recommendation M1.2. calls for activity of anyone contributing to data products.

Besides ORCID other PID systems for autors of scientific publications exist. The most relevant are Scopus Author ID, Researcher ID / PublonsID, ISNI, Wikidata ID. We will not discuss the pro’s and con’s of each PID system here in detail. We found, however, that ORCID offers the best solution in terms of stability, reliability, cost efficiency and widespread application of the PID systems mentioned above. In order to harmonize our metadata we therefore recommend it as a common solution to refer to authors / contributers in Helmholtz data infrastructures.

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

It is recommended, that Helmholtz employees should

1. register with ORCID if they haven’t done so already and keep their ORCID related metadata current and

2. share the relevant parts of this data with the center for use in the centers data systems in order to keep the information in the systems current.

Note 1: regarding activity 2, we recommend that employees publish their ORCID as part of their public data, a) in their email footer, b) on their personal institutional homepage.