I wanted to share the announcement of the very recently released report "Registering Researchers in Authority Files" from Karen Smith-Yoshimura at OCLC research in collaboration with an international task force. The convergence of traditional authority files, researcher ID registries like ORCID, and other biographical and bibliographical resouces has been a substantial concern for CNI's program over the past few years, and those attending the CNI membership meetings have seen a number of presentations recently exploring developments in this area.

The background and links to the report are at:

Registering Researchers in Authority Files

This report provides an overview of the researcher identifier landscape and presents functional requirements and recommendations for providing authoritative researcher identifiers. #oclcresearch #rrafreport

Karen's report is a very helpful summary of recent developments, with particular emphasis on the relationships to traditional name authority infrastructure. Essential reading for those tracking these issues.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

OCLC Research published a new report today: Registering Researchers in Authority Files.

Written by OCLC Research Program Officer Karen Smith-Yoshimura and a 13-member task group comprised of specialists from the US, UK and the Netherlands, this report summarizes their research into approaches to providing authoritative researcher identifiers.

Registering researchers in some type of authority file or identifier system has become more compelling as both institutions and researchers recognize the need to compile their scholarly output. The report presents functional requirements and recommendations for six stakeholders: researchers, funders, university administrators, librarians, and identity management systems, and aggregators (including publishers). It also provides an overview of the researcher identifier landscape, changes in the field, emerging trends, and opportunities.

See the Registering Researchers in Authority Files overview page for key highlights and to download the report in 8.5x11 or A4 formats. Supplementary data sets are also available for download, including: 18 use-case scenarios for the six stakeholders; functional requirements derived from the use-case scenarios; the list of 100 research networking and identifier systems the task group considered; characteristics profiles of 20 research networking and identifier systems; mappings of each of the 20 systems to the functional requirements; and a researcher identifier information flow diagram.