The ISNI International Agency Ltd has announced changes to its infrastructure focused on providing open identifiers for organisations working in the field of scholarly communications. The ISNI Organizations Registry will enable organisations to change and correct their own records and allow the research community to identify author affiliations persistently and authoritatively, thereby supporting analysis of research output and impact.
ISNI is already an open party identifier, widely used in various sectors and designed to work in many contexts such as resource discovery and royalty payment attribution. The ISNI Registry contains identity records associated with named individuals (8.75 million) and organisations (654 thousand) related to the scholarly and wider media industries. The ISNI-IA will manage its database of organisation records separately. The information it contains will be published under a CC0 licence and data will be available as a download and through an API that enables both retrieval and resolution of ISNI records.
ISNI-IA will also set up an Advisory Board for the ISNI Organizations Registry to ensure that the scholarly communications community has open and transparent access to ISNI-IA and is able to steer the efforts to ensure adoption of ISNI Organization records and cross-walks between all of the important and relevant datasets.
The significant milestones leading to the launch of the ISNI Organizations Registry are: segmentation of the organisation records and respective ISNI IDs into a database with a searchable user interface; the ISNI Organization IDs and associated core metadata available to all under a CC0 licence; regular data downloads of the entire ISNI Organizations Registry; an API for retrieval of ISNI IDs and records with the ability to resolve an existing ISNI ID; an online form for organizations to supply updates to their own records; and a new Advisory Board with representatives of the scholarly communications community to guide the efforts of the ISNI Organizations Registry.
This development responds to the requirements of the academic research community for identifying organisations, as articulated in a number of working groups (initiated by Jisc CASRAI-UK, OCLC, ORCID/Crossref/DataCite, and others). ISNI-IA has been involved in much of this work and this announcement reflects the needs expressed by research organisations and ISNI's own membership – in particular for open access to core identification data and giving user groups influence over the direction and development of the system.
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