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UK PID Consortium: Cost-Benefit Analysis
No full textThis report was commissioned by Jisc in early 2021, as part of their multi-year programme exploring how persistent identifiers (PIDs) can be used to reduce friction in the ongoing transition to open research. The vital contribution that PIDs can make to systemic efficiencies was highlighted in the UK Government's recent policy paper on reducing bureaucratic burdens on research, innovation and higher education. In this paper, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) committed to “stopping multiple asks for data or information that already exists elsewhere e.g. in ORCID, CrossRef, DataCite and Companies House."
The 2019 PID Roadmap for open access to UK research report summarised several years of work exploring ‘pain points’ in open access workflows. It identified five priority PIDs likely to contribute the greatest efficiency gains across the UK and global research information network:
● DOIs for outputs (Crossref and DataCite)
● Grants (Crossref)
● ORCID IDs for people
● RAiD (Research Activity iDs) for projects
● ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs for organisations
A graphical representation of the benefits of the five priority PIDs at each stage of a typical research lifecycle including grant application, output publication, and research reporting and evaluation is shown in Appendix A.
One of the PID roadmap report’s recommendations was that the UK should establish a ‘multi-PID consortium’ to optimise access to and adoption of five priority PIDs for open research. This original consortium proposal assumed that membership fees and coverage were the major barriers to the realisation of the system-wide benefits of PIDs. Other challenges identified included the lack of integrations between research information management, reporting systems, and institutional repositories.
Subsequent research undertaken as part of the PIDs for OA project, which followed the original report, extended the analysis, and found that: technical and financial barriers to adoption are too high; existing PID adoption is seen as under-delivering on expected benefits; and integrations are often partial and slow to arrive. Conversely, membership and service fees were not seen as an insurmountable hurdle by most. In light of these findings, the project stakeholder group (made up of more than 30 representatives from the research community, including individual experts, funders, research managers, publishers, repository providers, librarians, and researchers) concluded that the major issues preventing benefits realisation for existing PID systems are, in fact, inconsistent coverage, poor adoption, and relatively low levels of integration in information systems. The group therefore proposed that a PID consortium should be focussed on providing practical support for lowering the barriers to PID adoption, monitoring progress in increasing the coverage of PID registries, and driving adoption and increasing integrations with third-party systems by creating consensus among stakeholders. A subset of the stakeholder group was tasked with evaluating the consortium concept and making recommendations for next steps.
In its final report, this task group concluded that the potential value of PIDs to drive efficiency gains and generate new insight into research activities was significant, but would only be realised with a significant, UK-wide improvement in levels of adoption and coverage. Reaching these levels will incur integration costs, and is likely to require significant investment in coordination and support. The group recommended that the project team should do more work to explore questions around the likely costs of wide-scale PID integration and the potential benefits which might accrue as a result.
“The answer to this should be provided by a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. The analysis should gather data on the current UK-wide research information flows indicated by the value propositions, and compare them with examples of highly automated PID-optimised workflows from around the world (such as the work that has already been undertaken in Portugal and Australia2). In costing the real-world time savings from these examples and scaling them to match the volume of UK research information, it will be possible to model the benefits of varying levels of PID integration. Cost modelling would cover memberships and the levels of support needed to achieve those levels of integration, thus building the business case for investments in adoption support.”
This report presents the findings of our research into the current levels of PID adoption and usage, the likely benefits that they have already brought, and the scale of potential benefits that remain to be realised, based on the level of UK research activity. For the bulk of the concrete cost-saving calculations, we have focused on those PIDs that are already widely in use, especially ORCID IDs for people and DOIs for outputs (primarily research data and journal articles). For the other ‘priority’ entities, such as projects and grants, we can assess likely gains based on previous efforts to quantify the costs of manually inputting and cleaning data, together with the number of such entities covered in existing information systems. We have balanced these findings against previous estimates of the costs of PID integration, and the likely costs of scaled-up support, which we have based on information provided by current UK national PID consortia for DataCite (led by the British Library) and ORCID (led by Jisc).
Throughout, we have based our findings on the lowest plausible estimate. While this means that benefits will certainly be significantly underestimated, we believe a conservative approach offers the best basis for an assessment of any likely return on investment in extended PID adoption and integrations at the national level
BDC case study: University of Leicester
No full textOur digital campus: Developing a digitally
confident community of discovery (May 2018
Student digital experience insights survey 2020/21: question by question findings for UK further education based on data gathered October – December 2020 (pulse 1)
No full textBetween October and December 2020, 5,372 students from UK further education (FE) took part in our student digital experience insights survey, the first in a series of snapshots of the ongoing survey data, designed to support colleges to respond promptly to the changing situation caused by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. In total 10 UK FE colleges took part; all of these were based in England.
This report provides a full question by question analysis with further segmented analysis
