Small Data, Big Benefits:You’re Sitting on a Gold Mine

SSP – Concurrent 2AJune 2 2016Christine Orr

Your data is (potentially) your most valuable asset

Knowledge

Information

Data

Ringgold: Trusted data partner & part of the scholarly comms infrastructure• Ringgold is a small, for-profit, database publisher• 2003: Identify Database & the Ringgold ID are born out of a project to

disambiguate the institutional subscribers to OUP journals• This was not a unique problem

We’ve been helping publishers turn their data into an asset for a decade with the Ringgold Identifier & data quality expertise

420,000 Institutions in scholarly communications

MetadataHierarchiesRinggold ID

Univ Calif System

UCLA

Med School Coll of L&S

UCSD

Div of Physical Sci

UCLA: Univ Calif Los Angeles8783

UCLA: Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro

Alvarado33177

UCLA: Universidad Contemporanea de las

Americas376277

SizeTier

Subject Sector

+

MoreLocation

Small Data – what do we mean? • Metadata elements• Persistent IDs• Individual user records• Transactional data: usage,

payments, etc.

The big picture depends on every detail: accurate & interconnected data

What is preventing us from using our data to maximum advantage?

• Entity management: Jens-Peter Mueller or J-P. Müller? Uni Hannover or Hanover College?

• Data quality: Incomplete, outdated, duplicates, inaccurate.

• Interoperability: Systems, languages, data silos based on functions.

Who are our end users?

• Readers• Authors• Reviewers• Editors• Members• Student members• Meeting attendees• Volunteers• Faculty

Who are our Institutions?

Affiliations of Individuals:• Authors• Editors• Reviewers• Volunteer

• Funder of research• Payer of APC• Member

institutions• Licensees• Subscribers• Consortia

• Market intelligence about authors and institutions• Facility to create targeted marketing & outreach• Author and subscriber information mapped together• Knowledge of where research funding is concentrated• Reduction in time taken calculating open access charges (APCs) • Ability to resolve conflicts of interest (author & reviewer from same inst)

+ =

Big Benefits: When individuals & affiliations are joined together, publishers gain knowledge and capabilities

What solutions exist?

Entity Management: Adopt persistent IDs as appropriate

• People: ORCID• Places: Ringgold ID, ISNI, Funder ID• Things: DOIs

Data quality • Retrospective cleanup• Improve data capture process &

eliminate free text• Disambiguate & merge duplicate

records

Interoperability• Tools & standard data for integration• Systems-dependent

ORCID + Ringgold IDs: Joining people + places

• Joining People + Places

Thank you

Christine Orr

Sales Director

Christine.Orr@ringgold.com

www.ringgold.com

Ringgold’s Mission

To provide identifiers and structured data to power the efficient exchange of information

throughout the scholarly research community

...and beyond.