There is a community need for an independent, open, non-profit organization identifier registry. This framing document, prepared by the Executive Directors of Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, suggests a way to move forward. We propose forming a Working Group to develop a plan for the operation and governance of a registry. In developing this document we pulled from our own experiences in building and maintaining open identifier registries and recent thinking on the topic of open infrastructure. We are committed to working with the community on this initiative, starting with forming a Working Group to explore the requirements for an independent, sustainable, non-profit registry. This paper will be circulated among community stakeholders prior to the PIDapalooza meeting in November. It will be open for feedback until mid-November after which the Working Group will be established to take on responsibility for the project.

This document is based on an analysis of the current landscape of Organisational Identifierprovision, conducted during the second quarter of 2016 by Geoffrey Bilder (Crossref) andaugmented by further research conducted by Josh Brown and Tom Demeranville (ORCID).This public discussion paper has been prepared as a complement to the OrganisationIdentifier requirements document published by Crossref, DataCite and ORCID in March2016. It informs our analysis of the current landscape of identifer provision, and is intendedto be read alongside companion documents concerning the governance and functionalrequirements for Organisation Identifiers.

Organizational identifiers are needed to help solve the affiliation use case in scholarlycommunication, i.e., which research outputs are produced by researchers affiliated to aparticular institution. Organizations need to be involved in changes to the organization identifierand associated metadata, including splitting or merging of organizations, and information aboutsub-organizations. Organizational identifiers must follow established best practices forpersistent identifiers, including the linking to other organization identifiers and other resources inthe metadata. This paper was prepared jointly by Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID andsummarizes technical use cases for an organizational identifier system, and our understandingof priorities based on community consultations carried out over the course of the past year.

The scholarly research community has come to depend on a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success. Content identifiers (through DataCite and Crossref) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational...