Beneficiaries of organisation IDs must be willing to invest in them

A system of open digital identifiers for organisations would save huge amounts of effort and resources, say Laurel Haak and Josh Brown.

In universities, funding organisations and publishers worldwide, a large number of people spend a large amount of time and money finding out which organisations train and employ researchers, then connecting this information to research facilities, funders and publications. Collecting, annotating and curating these data manually is both wasteful and impossible to do comprehensively.

If these data were available in a globally standardised, digital, open format, this effort could be redirected towards analysis and improving research information and administration. An accessible, community-managed open infrastructure for data on research organisations would spur the development of new tools, link up existing services and support open research, as the examples of ORCID for researchers and digital object identifiers (DOIs) for papers and datasets have shown.