Persistent Identifiers (PID’s) provide a consistent way of digitally referencing items that aims to be more reliable than a simple web address. This is important for scholarly communications because citation and attribution are essential elements of scholarly apparatus. This course will introduce you to the concept of Persistent Identifiers, the problems that they address, and how they can be used in the academic environment to simplify some tasks. It will examine several different types of identifier, some of which are currently widely used (DOI’s for publications/data and ORCID’s for researchers) and others which are emerging in importance.

Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.