PIDapalooza 2021

The PID graph falls apart when it comes to legacy literature (pretty much everything pre-2000). The vast majority of historic publications lack DOIs. This means they sit outside the linked research infrastructure of modern publications, appearing in reference lists as unlinked citations (strings not things) or not at all, because they are too hard for authors to find and/or cite. The upshot of this is that our historic literature is falling into obscurity.

The same is true for historic researchers. ORCIDS must be self-administered, which means they cannot be assigned to dead people. This makes it impossible to connect and track the academic output of historic individuals (and their organisations) using ORCIDs, currently the only author identifier accepted by Crossref.

In 2020, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) launched a global working group to tackle this issue — to bring the world's biodiversity heritage literature into the modern lined network of scholarly research. PIDs have the potential to make the historic literature infinitely more discoverable. But the old literature is a square peg; it doesn't fit comfortably into the shiny round hole of modern PIDs. This session will discuss the challenges, issues and solutions around retrospectively assigning PIDs to the old stuff (and will showcase the platypuses we've discovered along the way).