The paper Uniform resolution of compact identifiers for biomedical data has been published, with eScienceLab’s Niall Beard and Nick Juty on the author list.

The Scientific Data article describes the joint effort by EMBL-EBI and California Digital Library to harmonize their compact identifier resolver services identifiers.org and N2T.net, respectively. The collaborative work was done under the umbrella of Force11 and an ELIXIR Implementation Study on Data Identification and Interoperability to provide machine-resolvable persistent identifiers for datasets across a wide range of biomedical data repositories.

In the accompanying editorial the journal is committing to improve data citations by adopting these services:

Scientific Data is changing the way we incorporate links into our data citations. We will now be taking advantage of the resolver services offered by identifiers.org and N2T.net to provide more standardized and predictable links for biomedical datasets that have accession identifiers when they are cited in our publications.

Nick Juty from The University of Manchester’s eScience Lab is quoted in the ELIXIR’s announcement:

All entries in Identifiers.org are carefully curated to a high standard, collating all the necessary information to unambiguously and accurately identify individual data records. This is a continuous process, requiring the addition of new resources, whilst maintaining and updating existing records.

Scientific Data: Uniform resolution of compact identifiers for biomedical data