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CESSDA lays the ground for further work on persistent identifiers in relation to FAIR principles
Mon 14 May 2018

At a collocated event during the 11th RDA Plenary Meeting, on 21-23 March 2018 in Berlin, experts from the CESSDA PID Task Force laid the ground for future work on persistent identifiers.

The aim of the meeting was to collect and discuss use cases that should be included in an extended PID Best Practice Guide later this year. The audience were staff from CESSDA Service Providers, as well as some external experts.

There were fourteen participants from CESSDA Service Providers from Germany, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Greece.

Participants learned about the CESSDA PID policy principles and best practices, and an open discussion followed on the extent to which the CESSDA PID principles support FAIR principles, looking at specific use cases.

The CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy was developed by the CESSDA PID Taskforce, consisting of members of GESIS (lead), SND and DANS. The first version of it was published in November 2017.

The aim this year is to support the implementation of the CESSDA PID Policy by the CESSDA service providers. Extended Best Practice Guidelines will be created on specific topics related to the FAIR principles.

Feedback from participants included the following suggestions:

  • a common terminology and a shared understanding of terms related to PID within the CESSDA context
  • guidance concerning versioning of documents and best practices of PIDs for large, international studies (e.g. ISSP)
  • common rules defined by CESSDA for versioning but also for further issues such as citation of data
  • need for further discussion especially with CESSDA working groups
  • further training and information on persistent identifiers.

Mari Kleemola, from FSD who attended the meeting and leads the new CESSDA Tools and Services Group explained, that this group will take a look at all the needs and demands and will prioritise them in line with the CESSDA strategy.

Participants were highly appreciative of the event and were thankful for the opportunity to share experiences.

More information:

Materials from the event

CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy in 2017

RDA event page