FOCUS AREAS

SURFfoundation stimulates ICT innovation in higher education and research in these focus areas:

DAI improves access to scientific and scholarly publications

SURF a pioneer in digital tracing of authors

25-08-2008

Tell-a-Friend

Forward this SURFfoundation newsitem.

Your name

Your e-mail

Name friend

E-mail friend

Message

Fields marked with a * are required and must be filled in

On 5 July this year, the Dutch NRC Handelsblad newspaper published a plea by PhD students Jochen Cals and Daniel Kotz for a unique and uniform “ID number” for researchers. They also published an article on the matter in the influential medical journal The Lancet. According to Cals and Kotz, finding all the publications of a particular researcher by searching for his or her name is virtually impossible.

In fact, the kind of unique number that they have in mind already exists: the Digital Author Identification number (DAI). The DAI system is an attempt by the Dutch research community to improve the accessibility, traceability, and quality of scientific and scholarly publications. In a letter published in NRC Handelsblad on 12 July, SURF – writing also on behalf of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) – pointed out that the DAI system already meets the need for a unique non-commercial number to identify scientific and scholarly authors.

The DAI is already familiar to managers of research registration systems in the Netherlands. A number of organisations have assigned DAIs to their own researchers. Moreover, universities, research institutions, the KNAW and SURF are working hard to link every research publication to the relevant DAI. That is a major task but the work generally takes place behind the scenes, so few researchers realise that the DAI is being introduced. Researchers can always ask their institution to let them know their own DAI.
The DAI makes it possible to integrate a number of different systems with one another, regardless of the spelling of a researcher’s family name and/or initials. The DAI is already being used for NARCIS, the national “gateway to Dutch scientific information” (www.narcis.info).

Account has been taken of privacy considerations and international developments: the DAI system has been registered with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (CBP) and the system is ready for the international ISO standard “ISNI” (International Standard Name Identifier).

Acting on the initiative of the KNAW, a pilot project started in August 2005 involving the Universities of Groningen and Nijmegen, the OCLC PICA foundation (now integrated into the OCLC), and SURF with the aim of “assigning a unique national number to every author with an appointment or other relevant link at/to a Dutch university or research institute”. Roll-out of the DAI system started in late 2006 at eleven universities, one research institution, the KNAW and the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research).