The ConfIDent project focuses on the development of a service platform for scientific events. ConfIDent aims to help researchers find relevant conferences in their field and to share information about conferences. The project is led by TIB – German National Library of Science and Technology and the Department of Information Systems & Databases at RWTH Aachen University (Chair of Computer Science 5).
The goal of the ConfIDent project is “to make the descriptive metadata on conferences and other formats of scientific events permanently accessible in a high quality through automated processes and scientific data curation” (https://projects.tib.eu/en/confident/). Pilot communities for the project included computer science and transport and mobility research. ConfIDent is a sustainable service for researchers who search for and publish information on scientific events, as well as universities, information infrastructure institutions, specialized societies, publishers and funding agencies. The project is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through November 2022 . To date, over 12,700 events have been added to the ConfIDent platform.
The idea of registering DOIs for scientific events was initiated by a working group on PIDs for Conferences initiated by Crossref and DataCite, which published a first draft metadata schema for comment in 2018. ConfIDent has taken up this preliminary work and developed a metadata schema to describe scientific events in a sustainable way.
Metadata guidelines
The first DOI for a conference in ConfIDent was registered in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.25798/qsdh-en13). During 2022, the DataCite Metadata Working Group has been working on the next version of the metadata schema. While working on Version 4.5, we encountered several resource type-specific use cases where the optimal solution may require a breaking change to the metadata schema—including PIDs for conferences. Therefore, to enable a flexible and robust solution, PIDs for conferences will be considered as part of schema version 5.0.
In the meantime, it is important that the community has succinct guidelines to register PIDs for conferences. The ConfIDent team has shared their guidance here on the TIB Blog: How to mint a DOI for academic events and event series?. In particular, we recommend using the following properties to identify the DOI as a conference:
“resourceTypeGeneral”: “Event”
“resourceType”: free text describing the event, e.g., “Academic Online Conference”
See the link below for the full example:
https://api.datacite.org/application/vnd.datacite.datacite+json/10.25798/qsdh-en13
For more examples, see the DOIs registered by ConfIDent in Datacite Commons.
Path forward
The ConfIDent project has provided a roadmap for the future of conference IDs (Franken et al, 2022) and the DataCite Metadata Working Group will be tracking these developments closely.
From our experience, we know that it is important to continuously improve an existing metadata schema while taking into account new requirements from the community. Therefore, we welcome ConfIDent’s intention to further improve the metadata schema based on further feedback from the community, especially with regard to indicators for social responsibility and environmental sustainability of academic events.
Kelly Stathis
