Books have ISBN. Articles have DOI. Authors have ORCID. Institutions have ROR. Until recently, conferences or events had nothing. But that started changing in the last couple of years (Franken et al. 2022).
The idea of serial numbers, or persistent identifiers (PIDs) as they are more commonly called today, is one of those boring but so useful bits of scientific infrastructure. They enable so much data collection that you can get a much clearer picture of trends in fields.
There is now a working identifier for events and conferences called ConfIDent. (Conference IDentification, I see what you did there. Well done, punsters.)
As someone who has been actively campaigning for people to take conference posters more seriously, I think this is an important step. I hope that with this sort of identifier, we could eventually start to answer questions like, how many posters and slide talks are given at conferences every year? How many works are eventually published in journals or elsewhere?
For individual posters, a DOI is the more appropriate identifier. If organizers don’t create DOIs for your poster, you can generate one by uploading your poster on services like Figshare or Zenodo.
If you are a conference organizer, I encourage you to give your next conference an identifier. Broadcast that to your members and tell them what it is and how to use it.
If you are a conference attendee, I encourage you to ask the organizers for the ConfIDent number of the event, share this blog post if they have no clue what that means, and list the ConfIDent number of events you attend in your CV.
Hat tip to Alice Meadows of MoreBrains for pointers here.
Reference
Franken J, Birukou A, Eckert K, Fahl W, Hauschke C, Lange C. 2022. Persistent identification for conferences. Data Science Journal 21(1): 11. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011
External links
ConfIDent platform (see especially FAQ on requesting a conference ID)
ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences (blog post)
ConfIDent project (completed 2022)
Posts
1 comment:
"If you are a conference organizer, I encourage you to give your next conference an identifier."
How? The site's "Create Event" page is uneditable, and labelled "You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reason: The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Users." in which "Users" is a link to page with no content.
The FAQ says to email for event registration, which is not scalable. It also says that "ConfIDent purely focuses on academic events and [not] cultural events like festivals or art exibitions [SIC]". The applicable definition of "adcademic" is not stated.
You draw comparison with ORCID, but registration for ORCID iDs is far more open.
Unlike ORCID, I see no mention that ConfIDent data is to be made available under an open licence.
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