We All Know What We Mean, Can We Just Put It In The Policy?

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), argues that policies on identifiers are too vague and need to be specific. Within the sphere of scholarly communications, there is a common understanding of the value of PIDs, metadata. It is past time that we all agree on a core set of identifiers and basic metadata elements and begin to encourage researchers to use them at scale when communicating their results. In order to facilitate this, funders, publishers, and systems providers need to ensure that ease of use and seamless interoperability are achieved so as not to create barriers to adoption.