The below case study is by Alice Meadows, a co-founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative. It was published in the Scholarly Kitchen on 3 October 2024.

This case study coincides with ‘Interoperability, Openness, and Impact – Recommendations and Roadmap for an Irish National PID Strategy’ a new report outlining a national persistent identifier (PID) strategy for Ireland which will be launched on 25 October. The report was prepared by Ireland’s National Open Research Forum (NORF) and the NORF PID Task Force, in consultation with MoreBrains Cooperative. Alice Meadows discusses how the Irish community were engaged for the project.

It’s often said (including by me!) that technological change is easy compared with the social and cultural change needed to successfully implement that new technology. The challenge of bringing everyone along with you when implementing change of any sort shouldn’t be underestimated. And, if managing change is difficult within one organization, it’s even more challenging at the community level. But it’s also a wonderful opportunity to engage with and understand that community — something that I was repeatedly reminded of during our (MoreBrains Cooperative) recently completed project to help develop a national persistent identifier (PID) strategy in Ireland.

Like much technology (and, indeed, social media), PIDs are networked entities: the more they’re used, the more everyone benefits (just like, say, cell phones or Facebook), which makes getting everyone on board even more important. So, with the help of the National Open Research Forum (NORF) and their PID Task Force, one of the first things we did in Ireland was to identify the different stakeholders (both organizational and individual) whose support we knew would be essential. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t just hear from the usual suspects — such as the larger organizations — but also from the long tail of smaller and/or more specialist institutions. And we also wanted to encourage both a top-down and bottom-up approach, as we’ve found this to be very successful in the past.

Our approach to community engagement typically comprises three main areas of activity: 1) broadcast outreach, to inform and engage with the widest possible range of individuals and organizations; 2) consultation and consensus-building, to ensure a common understanding and alignment with those stakeholders; and 3) strategic relationship development, to ensure buy-in from key individuals and organizations. Happily, there was already an existing commitment to open science at the national level in Ireland, which made engaging with the community much easier — many of the stakeholders had been identified and were already aware of and, in many cases, actively engaged with the National Action Plan for Open Research. It also helped that the Irish research community is relatively small and well networked, both nationally and internationally.

To establish a baseline, we started our community engagement efforts with a survey, to help us to understand what the community does and doesn’t know about PIDs, what they want and need from them, what they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as barriers to and opportunities for PIDs in their communities, and more. The full survey results are now openly available; key findings included:

• A one-size-fits-all approach to expanding PID adoption won’t work. There are clear variations within and between Irish research organizations in terms of their awareness, understanding, and experience of PIDs: different communities, organizations, and individuals have different priorities and views on PID benefits and barriers, which need to be taken into account
• Socialization of the PID national strategy is essential. Ensuring the widest possible buy-in and support from the community will require fully engaging both with stakeholder groups — especially those that were under-represented or unrepresented in the survey — and with key individual influencers and decision-makers
• Clear, consistent messaging is needed. Outreach materials must be developed centrally for the Irish research community overall and for individual segments, both by sector (eg, research performing institutions, funders) and by function (eg, librarians, IT staff)
• Building on existing expertise and support is invaluable. For example, NORF’s work on the Irish National Action Plan for Open Research prepared the way within the Irish research community for the PIDs project, helping to ensure widespread understanding of, and buy-in for, widespread adoption

The survey results provided us with lots of useful information, including highlighting some challenges, for example, around different levels of understanding about the value of PIDs, or differing views of the benefits of and barriers to widespread adoption. Some of these differences were at the sector level, others were within a single organization! In order to dig further into our findings, we organized a series of virtual focus groups (by sector) and a community workshop. What we learned helped us better understand individual community needs, as well as what messages were likely to resonate best with different sectors and leaders.

At the same time as running these community events, we were also busy socializing the results of a second strand of work, conducted alongside the roadmap development, to demonstrate the value of widespread adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) in Ireland. Our cost-benefit analysis showed that up to 4,000 person days annually (equivalent to €1.8 million a year) would be saved by investing in a centrally funded service to support PID adoption at Irish universities. Unsurprisingly, many focus group and workshop attendees felt this would be useful evidence to share with their colleagues and leaders!

Our draft recommendations were shared with the community for feedback in June this year, before being finalized. We worked closely with NORF and the PID Task Force to develop them, and they’re grouped into four themes, based on the input and feedback we received over the course of the project:

Governance and leadership

• Recommendation 1: Create a long term cross-stakeholder governing group tasked with strategy delivery
• Recommendation 2: Involve senior sector leaders in the strategy delivery
• Recommendation 3: Establish clear ownership of the PID agenda
• Recommendation 4: Draft an Irish PID concordat

Community

• Recommendation 6: Build out a network of networks to drive PID adoption
• Recommendation 7: Build a shared resource library

Culture change

• Recommendation 8: Articulate a vision with a timeline
• Recommendation 9: Empower and support community champions
• Recommendation 10: Identify and deliver quick wins
• Recommendation 11: Leverage existing partnerships to shape PID developments nationally and internationally
• Recommendation 12: Recruit in expertise to extend and increase PID capabilities

Technical support

• Recommendation 13: Establish a central PID support service
• Recommendation 14: Identify and specify key integrations
• Recommendation 15: Investing in targeted support

The full roadmap and recommendations will be launched at a NORF-hosted workshop on October 25, and will then be openly available on the NORF website. They represent a great deal of work on the part of many members of the Irish research community — with more to come, as they now start working to implement them.

We are immensely grateful to everyone who participated in the roadmap project, especially the team at NORF and their PID Task Force, and we wish you all the luck of the Irish as you take the roadmap from vision to reality in the coming years!

Alice Meadows a Co-Founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative, a scholarly communications consultancy with a focus on open research and research infrastructure. She has many years experience of both scholarly publishing (including at Blackwell Publishing and Wiley) and research infrastructure (at ORCID and, most recently, NISO, where she was Director of Community Engagement).