DOI for a university

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Hello experts!

Can a university have its own unique DOI? What is the registration algorithm?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

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Hello Angela! A university wouldn’t have a DOI but all organisations involved in research should have a ROR ID - see https://ror.org/ and maybe do a search to find the identifier. Crossref is planning to use ROR IDs for affiliation metadata. SO the persistent identifier for Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University Named After I. Ulyanov is https://ror.org/00j0x9b96 and you can see the ROR record at that link (Research Organization Registry (ROR) Search). Is this the kind of thing you mean?

Ginny

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Hello Ginny!

Yes, I meant exactly a persistent identifier for a university. It’s great to know that we already have such an identifier, and that there are the university pages in Wikidata, OrgRef, GRID!

Glad to hear that Crossref is planning to use ROR IDs for affiliation metadata! You work tirelessly to solve the problem of the most complete transfer of knowledge and technology.

Angela

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Great to see that Crossref is planning to use ROR IDs for affiliation metadata! Is there any plan to include any occurrence of a ROR ID in a publication? For example, this journal article, https://0-academic-oup-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/mnras/article/506/2/2659/6317622, includes a ROR ID in the Acknowledgements section. This would be so valuable for facilities needing or wanting to track outputs that acknowledge them.

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Hello @alslib ,

Thanks for your question! Those ROR IDs are intended to be included in the metadata as contributor affiliations or organizational contributors. I cannot review the Acknowledgements section of that DOI, as it is behind a paywall, but typically information in an Acknowledgements section would not be included in the metadata (instead, the ROR ID would appear in the contributor affiliation or organizational contributor metadata).

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Kind regards,
Isaac

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Hi @ifarley
Here is another example of a journal article where a facility’s ROR is included in the Acknowledgements section. This one is Gold OA: Adapted laboratory evolution of Thermotoga sp. strain RQ7 under carbon starvation | BMC Research Notes | Full Text

Scopus now finds 3 articles where a ROR is included in the Acknowledgements section; the other two are:

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Hi @alslib ,

Thanks for these additional examples. It helps to be able to see the Acknowledgements section. I think that first example - DOI https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/s13104-022-05982-9 - is a good example to start with.

So, in this example, authors Christa Pennacchio, Anna Lipzen, and Joel Martin are all affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and therefore best practice would be to include the ROR ID (https://ror.org/04xm1d337) in the author affiliation metadata registered with us.

The contributor metadata (XML) currently registered for this DOI looks like this (here’s the full metadata record in XML: https://0-doi-crossref-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/search/doi?pid=support@crossref.org&format=unixsd&doi=10.1186%2Fs13104-022-05982-9) :

<contributors>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="first">
<given_name>Jyotshana</given_name>
<surname>Gautam</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<given_name>Hui</given_name>
<surname>Xu</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<given_name>Junxi</given_name>
<surname>Hu</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<given_name>Christa</given_name>
<surname>Pennacchio</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<given_name>Anna</given_name>
<surname>Lipzen</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<given_name>Joel</given_name>
<surname>Martin</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<given_name>Zhaohui</given_name>
<surname>Xu</surname>
<ORCID>http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1866-3254</ORCID>
</person_name>
</contributors>

Ideally (but not required of our members), those ROR IDs would be registered in/added to the contributor metadata for those contributors affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337), like this:

<affiliations>
 <institution>
 <institution_name>U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute</institution_name>
<institution_id type="ror">https://ror.org/04xm1d337</institution_id>
</institution>
</affiliations>

As for the funding data, the member publisher has registered the funding data as:

<fr:program xmlns:fr="http://0-www-crossref-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/fundref.xsd" name="fundref">
<fr:assertion name="funder_name">
U.S. Department of Energy
<fr:assertion name="funder_identifier">http://0-dx-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.13039/100000015</fr:assertion>
</fr:assertion>
<fr:assertion name="award_number">CSP 503801</fr:assertion>
</fr:program>

That bit of the metadata looks good.

So, in this example, since the author’s appear to be affiliated with U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337), adding the ROR ID to the contributor metadata would be best practice.

Does this help clarify?

-Isaac

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Hi @ifarley

Yes, that does clarify the potential for an affiliation ROR to be included in the metadata for this article.

However, https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1038/s41587-021-01195-w (bronze OA, you should be able to see the full article including the author affiliations and the Acknowledgements section) has no authors from the Joint Genome Institute. This “DOE Office of Science User Facility” is acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section, along with its ROR, thank goodness :blush:

This is the use case I am interested in: the identification of publications acknowledging the use of a facility, regardless of the inclusion of authors showing that facility as an affiliation.

It would be good to know if Crossref has any plans to include a “facility ROR” from the Acknowledgements section in future schema updates.

I acknowledge (pun intended :wink:) that publishers would then need to be encouraged to send that metadata to Crossref, assuming it is not/cannot be extracted automatically from the text.

Regards

Anne

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Hi Anne,

I discussed this internally with my colleagues. We find our recommendation here a bit challenging since the specific language in that Acknowledgements section (https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1038/s41587-021-01195-w) is vague for the purposes of determining authorship:

The work conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy operated under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Because of that, it’s best for us to defer to the publisher in this case. Since they did not include the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337) as an affiliation in any of the author information and also neglected to include the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute as an organizational contributor, we’re not comfortable suggesting that the metadata is inaccurate. That said, if, in other scenarios, the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, could be considered an organizational contributor, then it would be appropriate to add the organizational contributor and the ROR ID to the contributor metadata; maybe something like this:

<contributors>
<organization sequence="additional" contributor_role="author">U.S. Department of Energy</organization>
<affiliations>
<institution>
<institution_name>U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute</institution_name>
<institution_id type="ror">https://ror.org/04xm1d337</institution_id>
</contributors>

Again, authorship seems like a big deal and we do not want to suggest signaling authorship when it is inappropriate.

We thought of a few example scenarios where this could be clarified:

  1. the organization helped contribute to the authorship of the paper (therefore the organization (and its ROR ID) should be included as a contributor to the work)
  2. the organization provided access to research facilities and/or funding (therefore the organization (and its funder ID) should be included as a funder to the work)
  3. the organization provided mentorship or other kinds of guidance/assistance that don’t fall into either authorship or funding credit (we don’t currently have a good way of capturing this kind of acknowledgement in the metadata)

Thus, ROR IDs can be registered with us for individual and organizational contributors that meet that first scenario, but not for either scenario 2 (they’d instead use a funder ID) or scenario 3. That may evolve over time.

I hope this answers your question. Let us know what you think.

-Isaac