Reduce Administrative Research Burden with ORCID and DOI Persistent Digital Identifiers
There exists a low-effort, low-cost way to reduce administrative burden for our scientists, and make it easier for everyone – scientists, funders, legislators, and the public – to document the incredible productivity of federal science agencies. If adopted throughout government research these tools would maximize interoperability across reporting systems, reduce the administrative burden and costs, and increase the accountability of our scientific community. The solution: persistent digital identifiers (Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs) and Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs) for key personnel. ORCIDs are already used by most federal science agencies. We propose that federal science agencies also adopt digital object identifiers for research awards, an industry-wide standard. A practical and detailed implementation guide for this already exists.
The Opportunity
Tracking the impact and outputs of federal research awards is labor-intensive and expensive. Federally funded scientists spend over 900,000 hours a year writing interim progress reports alone. Despite that tremendous effort, our ability to analyze the productivity of federal research awards is limited. These reports only capture research products created while the award is active, but many exciting papers and data sets are not published until after the award is over, making it hard for the funder to associate them with a particular award or agency initiative. Further, these data are often not structured in ways that support easy analysis or collaboration. When it comes time for the funding agency to examine the impact of an award, a call for applications, or even an entire division, staff rely on a highly manual process that is time-intensive and expensive. Thus, such evaluations are often not done. Deep analysis of federal spending is next to impossible, and simple questions regarding which type of award is better suited for one scientific problem over another, or whether one administrative funding unit is more impactful than a peer organization with the same spending level, are rarely investigated by federal research agencies. These questions are difficult to answer without a simple way to tie award spending to specific research outputs such as papers, patents, and datasets.
To simplify tracking of research outputs, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directed federal research agencies to “assign unique digital persistent identifiers to all scientific research and development awards and intramural research protocols […] through their digital persistent identifiers.” This directive builds on work from the Trump White House in 2018 to reduce the burden on researchers and the National Security Strategy guidance. It is a great step forward, but it has yet to be fully implemented, and allows implementation to take different paths. Agencies are now taking a fragmented, agency-specific approach, which will undermine the full potential of the directive by making it difficult to track impact using the same metrics across federal agencies.
Without a unified federal standard, science publishers, awards management systems, and other disseminators of federal research output will continue to treat award identifiers as unstructured text buried within a long document, or URLs tucked into acknowledgement sections or other random fields of a research product. These ad hoc methods make it difficult to link research outputs to their federal funding. It leaves scientists and universities looking to meet requirements for multiple funding agencies, relying on complex software translations of different agency nomenclatures and award persistent identifiers, or, more realistically, continue to track and report productivity by hand. It remains too confusing and expensive to provide the level of oversight our federal research enterprise deserves.
There is an existing industry standard for associating digital persistent identifiers with awards that has been adopted by the Department of Energy and other funders such as the ALS Association, the American Heart Association, and the Wellcome Trust. It is a low-effort, low-cost way to reduce administrative burden for our scientists and make it easier for everyone – scientists, federal agencies, legislators, and the public – to document the incredible productivity of federal science expenditures.
Adopting this standard means funders can automate the reporting of most award products (e.g., scientific papers, datasets), reducing administrative burden, and allowing research products to be reliably tracked even after the award ends. Funders could maintain their taxonomy linking award DOIs to specific calls for proposals, study sections, divisions, and other internal structures, allowing them to analyze research products in much easier ways. Further, funders would be able to answer the fundamental questions about their programs that are usually too labor-intensive to even ask, such as: did a particular call for applications result in papers that answered the underlying question laid out in that call? How long should awards for a specific type of research problem last to result in the greatest scientific productivity? In the light of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other analytic tools, making the linkages between research funding and products standardized and easy to analyze opens possibilities for an even more productive and accountable federal research enterprise going forward. In short, assigning DOIs to awards fulfills the requirements of the 2022 directive to maximize interoperability with other funder reporting systems, the promise of the 2018 NSTC report to reduce burden, and new possibilities for a more accountable and effective federal research enterprise.
Plan of Action
The overall goal is to increase accountability and transparency for federal research funding agencies and dramatically reduce the administrative burden on scientists and staff. Adopting a uniform approach allows for rapid evaluation and improvements across the research enterprise. It also enables and for the creation of comparable data on agency performance. We propose that federal science agencies adopt the same industry-wide standard – the DOI – for awards. A practical and detailed implementation guide already exists.
These steps support the existing directive and National Security Strategy guidance issued by OSTP and build on 2018 work from the NSTC:.
Recommendation 1. An interagency committee led by OSTP should coordinate and harmonize implementation to:
- Develop implementation timelines and budgets for each agency that are consistent with existing industry standards;
- Consult with other stakeholders such as scientific publishers and awardee institutions, but consider that guidance and industry standards already exist, so there is no need for lengthy consultation.
Recommendation 2. Agencies should fully adopt the industry standard persistent identifier infrastructure for research funding—DOIs—for awards. Specifically, funders should:
- Ensure they are listed in the Research Organization Registry at the administrative level (e.g., agency, division) that suits their reporting and analytic needs.
- Require and collect ORCIDs, a digital identifier for researchers widely used by academia and scientific publishers, for the key personnel of an award.
- Issue DOIs for individual awards, and link those awards to the appropriate organizational units and research funding initiatives in the metadata to facilitate evaluation.
Recommendation 3. Agencies should require the Principal Investigator (PI) to cite the award DOI in research products (e.g., scientific papers, datasets). This requirement could be included in the terms and conditions of each award. Using DOIs to automate much of progress reporting, as described below, provides a natural incentive for investigators to comply.
Recommendation 4. Agencies should use award persistent identifiers from ORCID and award DOI systems to identify research products associated with an award to reduce PI burden. Awardees would still be required to certify that the product arose directly from their federal research award. After the award and reporting obligation ends, the agency can continue to use these systems to link products to awards based on information provided by the product creators to the product distributors (e.g., authors citing an award DOI when publishing a paper), but without the direct certification of the awardee. This compromise provides the public and the funder with better information about an award’s output, but does not automatically hold the awardee liable if the product conflicts with a federal policy.
Recommendation 5. Agencies should adopt or incorporate award DOIs into their efforts to describe agency productivity and create more efficient and consistent practices for reporting research progress across all federal research funding agencies. Products attributable to the award should be searchable by individual awards, and by larger collections of awards, such as administrative Centers or calls for applications. As an example of this transparency, PubMed, with its publicly available indexing of the biomedical literature, supports the efforts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s RePORTER), and could serve as a model for other fields as persistent identifiers for awards and research products become more available.
Recommendation 6. Congress should issue appropriations reporting language to ensure that implementation costs are covered for each agency and that the agencies are adopting a universal standard. Given that the DOI for awards infrastructure works even for small non-profit funders, the greatest costs will be in adapting legacy federal systems, not in utilizing the industry standard itself.
Challenges
We envision the main opposition to come from the agencies themselves, as they have multiple demands on their time and might have shortcuts to implementation that meet the letter of the requirement but do not offer the full benefits of an industry standard. This short-sighted position denies both the public transparency needed on research award performance and the massive time and cost savings for the agencies and researchers.
A partial implementation of this burden-reducing workflow already exists. Data feeds from ORCID and PubMed populate federal tools such as My Bibliography, and in turn support the biosketch generator in SciENcv or an agency’s Research Performance Progress Report. These systems are feasible because they build on PubMed’s excellent metadata and curation. But PubMed does not index all scientific fields.
Adopting DOIs for awards means that persistent identifiers will provide a higher level of service across all federal research areas. DOIs work for scientific areas not supported by PubMed. And even for the sophisticated existing systems drawing from PubMed, user effort could be reduced and accuracy increased if awards were assigned DOIs. Systems such as NIH RePORTER and PubMed currently have to pull data from citation of award numbers in the acknowledgment sections of research papers, which is more difficult to do.
Conclusion
OSTP and the science agencies have put forth a sound directive to make American science funding even more accountable and impactful, and they are on the cusp of implementation. It is part of a long-standing effort to reduce burden and make the federal research enterprise more accountable and effective. Federal research funding agencies are susceptible to falling into bureaucratic fragmentation and inertia by adopting competing approaches that meet the minimum requirements set forth by OSTP, but offer minimal benefit. If these agencies instead adopt the industry standard that is being used by many other funders around the world, there will be a marked reduction in the burden on awardees and federal agencies, and it will facilitate greater transparency, accountability, and innovation in science funding. Adopting the standard is the obvious choice and well within America’s grasp, but avoiding bureaucratic fragmentation is not simple. It takes leadership from each agency, the White House, and Congress.
This memo produced as part of the Federation of American Scientists and Good Science Project sprint. Find more ideas at Good Science Project x FAS
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