30 October 2013

Scientific output is not just about academic papers: datasets, software, and various forms of multimedia may be produced in the course of research. It is vital that these diverse outputs be citable using persistent identifiers, so that the sharing and the reuse of such materials can be tracked. 

Two weeks ago, the ODIN first year conference was held at CERN to discuss the challenges related to increasing the interoperability of persistent author and object identifiers. These efforts are of particular relevance to large research organizations like CERN, where some high-level datasets have recently been made available to other scientists for re-use.  Equally, the large numbers of collaborators working on the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider can make correct attribution of articles and datasets challenging, too.