Convenience and Compliance: Case Studies on Persistent Identifiers in European Research Information Management

This report provides university and research library leaders with useful insights on emerging practices and infrastructures in European research information management (RIM), on the current and future role of persistent person and organization identifiers, and, more specifically, on incentives and barriers to adoption in three different national settings—Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands—in order to better understand the decision-making dynamics in this space.Through research and semi-structured interviews with practitioners and stakeholders within universities, national libraries, and collaborative information and communications technology (ICT) organizations in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, the authors explore local institutional RIM practices and examine the role—perhaps even the necessity—of persistent identifiers for the facilitation of group-scale RIM activity and data aggregation. This work was part of a joint research collaboration with LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries).This report documents a rapidly changing RIM landscape, as CRIS systems aggregate more types of data, harvest publications from a growing number of external sources, and serve as an important node interoperating within a large, complex scholarly communications landscape