Community Responds to ORFG’s Call to Improve Research Output Tracking
In June of this year, as part of the efforts of the ORFG’s Compliance & Output Tracking Working Group, we published an open letter – a call to action for interested parties across the research ecosystem to engage, convene, and collaborate in service of better research output tracking. As a first step, we launched a short community survey. Today, we release our report on the survey findings, which can be read in full here.
Some highlights from the findings include:
Responses from a variety of actors: The survey received 26 rich, detailed responses from actors across the research ecosystem, including content (code, data, preprint) repository providers, professional academics, research funders, scholarly publishers, and software or tool developers, among others.
Importance of persistent identifiers and improved metadata: Respondents consistently highlighted the need for persistent identifiers (PIDs) – including DOIs, author PIDs like ORCIDs, and Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs – to be assigned to both research outputs and grants, and included in associated metadata. Funders and publishers were mentioned as key actors to promote PID use, through stronger policies and supportive infrastructure (e.g., grant and article submission systems). Respondents also called for open, machine-readable, high-quality metadata with funding information.
Multiple calls for collaboration: While there were calls for specific actions by particular sectors, funding and publishing being the most commonly mentioned, respondents also emphasized the need for more shared discussions and collaboration across the ecosystem. Among the actors mentioned were authors, grantees/researchers, content aggregators, software providers, university program offices, vendor systems, and more. One of the ORFG’s goals is to bring these actors together and facilitate these shared discussions through our virtual convenings (see below).
Willingness to engage: One of the most encouraging aspects was the overall willingness of respondents to engage, discuss further with the ORFG and other actors, and work together to improve research output tracking. Several respondents mentioned cross-sector and community-building efforts currently in place or planned, and we are eager to explore where these efforts might intersect or complement one another. When asked whether they would be interested in participating in a future convening on this subject, an overwhelming majority of respondents said ‘yes’. Our first online open community call will be held on September 27th, 2022 at 8am PT / 10am CT / 11am ET.
The information gleaned from this community survey is far richer than can be represented in the bullets above. Therefore, we encourage you to read our full report and reach out to us if you have comments or questions. If you would like to attend our virtual convening on research output tracking, please register here.