An OCLC Research Report by: The OCLC Research Registering Researchers in Authority Files Task Group

Key highlights:

• “While funders and publishers have been adopting researcher identifiers, it is equally important for research institutions and libraries to recognize that “authors are not strings” and that persistent identifiers are needed to link authors their scholarly output.
• Although there are overlaps among identifier systems, no one system will ever include all researchers or meet all functional requirements, so the ability to communicate among systems becomes crucial.
• New modes of scholarly communication increase the need to rely on persistent researcher identifiers to attribute output to the correct researcher and the researcher’s institution.
• Funders are finding persistent identifiers are important to for efficient and scalable tracking of the impact of the research they support.
• Although interoperability between systems is increasing, approaches used in different identifier systems for formats and data elements are often not interoperable.
• There is a huge opportunity for third-party reconciliation or resolution services to provide linking among different identifier systems.”