A standard for persistently identifying documents

[edent]

Create A Challenge

I am creating this challenge on behalf of the Data Standards Authority, based on suggestions from the community

Title

A standard for persistently identifying documents and datasets, allowing academics to cite them in a convenient way.

Category

• [x] Data
• [x] Document
• [ ] Technical
• [ ] Other Suggestions

Challenge Owner

The Data Standards Authority was set up to make it easier and more effective to share and use data across government.

Short Description

Government publishes documents and data sets. These are often used in academic works. In order to aide discoverability, reuse, and ease of use - we propose that any new publication should have:

1. A persistent resolvable identifier - which is decoupled from the URl of the document.
2. (Potentially) a standard for how to cite the document. Similar to the OGL text.

User Need

• As an academic:
  • I want to be able to cite a document or data set in a standard way.
  • When I see a citation, I want to be able to retrieve the original data or document.
• As a publisher:
  • I want to see where my documents have been cited, so that I can demonstrate their usefulness and measure their impact.

Other needs TBD.

Expected Benefits

As a data-driven government, we want to be able to see where our data is being used. Having a common citation method enables us to see which publications have the most impact.

Creating an easily referenced identifier makes it easier for academics to use our work.

In the long term, it makes data easier to use and discover.

As part of our Open Government Partnership goals, we need to make it easier to work with open data.

Functional Needs

The current open standard - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/persistent-resolvable-identifiers#functional-needs - says:

URNs such as DOIs meet the requirement for persistence but do not meet the requirement for easy resolvability as they are only resolvable through separate services. DOIs, and the systems that support them, are designed to identify information assets such as documents whereas URLs have an unlimited scope.

and

URNs such as DOIs can also be created without conflict, but with a much higher governance barrier than URLs.

We believe that the time is right to re-examine these statements. DOI is now an established part of academia. We believe that DOI may increase the use of government data. Being able to measure the impact of our data publications will help us make the case for publication.

DOIs could be issued by the GOV.UK publishing system, or data.gov.uk, or the National Archives. Alternatively, they could be issued by each department - although is likely to be an unnecessary duplication of effort.

References:

• This suggestion from 2017 https://github.com/alphagov/open-standards/issues/43
• The DOI standard https://doi.org/10.1109/5.771073
• This comment on Twitter

• I don't understand why important reports such as this one rarely contain a "how to cite this document" section nor a DOI where the file can be found and downloaded from. If you get the PDF alone it's hard to know where it came from? https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f85aa45e90e0732a2448113/20-10-05_DFID_OA_in_LMICs_-_final_report.pdf #OpenAccessWeek

  • From Ernesto Priego https://twitter.com/ernestopriego/status/1319586695407407104

• CrossRef description of the benefit of DOI
• DOI Foundation Members

[pigsonthewing]

ONS are starting a pilot of DOI!

https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2023/08/09/making-it-easier-to-track-impact-at-ons/

Is there an update on this pilot? Or a projected date for one?

[DrJacqui]

As per housekeeping practices we are closing this with the status as a recommended standard.

Great to see the housekeeping activities Didac