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By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Tracey Armstrong: ‘Identifiers to Power Interoperability’
Familiar to Publishing Perspectives readers, Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) based in Danvers, Massachusetts in the States, has announced its acquisition of Ringgold, which is incorporated in Beaverton, Oregon, and in Bristol, in England’s West Country.
Ringgold deals in “persistent identifiers,” which are those disambiguating elements of metadata, not unlike an ISBN.
The persistent identifier or PID uses what’s known as the Handle System and Rosetta to give an object or an intellectual property persistent identification across a range of platforms and context, much as the ISBN “follows” the title it identifies through multiple scenarios, functions, and databases.
Like a good retina scan that might be used by the Clear biometric system to get you through airport security quickly and then used by your airline at the gate instead of a boarding pass, a persistent identifier works across various systems to confirm what a piece of intellectual property is, who owns it, and so on.
Ringgold, as announced on Tuesday (May 3) is now a wholly owned subsidiary of CCC.
Tracey Armstrong
In a prepared statement, Tracey Armstrong, CCC’s president and CEO, is quoted, saying, “Globally unique PIDs are essential for creating connections between articles, researchers, institutions, and funders.
“We look forward to collaborating with Ringgold and industry stakeholders to further invest in identifiers to power interoperability, and data-driven applications.
“In particular, we’ll collaborate with partners to infuse PIDs earlier in the research life cycle, addressing market demand for consistent use of PIDs in the article workflow.”
Laura Cox
For Ringgold, the company’s president, CFO, and COO, says, “The value of PIDs in scholarly communications has grown exponentially and yet there are still unmet needs.”
“This calls for a robust infrastructure, further experimentation to address specific use cases, and broader implementation of PIDs across the value chain.
“As part of CCC, we’ll join forces to expand partnerships, experiment to address new use cases, invest in infrastructure, and create new data and analytics offerings.”
CCC has partnered with Ringgold for years and employs its identifiers to disambiguate author affiliations, the company says, related to article processing charges in CCC’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications offering.
Ringgold’s IdentifyDB identifier database, according to this announcements media messaging, contains more than 600,000 organization IDs and related metadata.
Supporting initiatives that CCC has backed include ORCID and the ISNI.
In hybrid and pure open-access publishing models, CCC’s information for the news media says that the company “has brought together key open-access stakeholders from the author, publisher, institution, funding, and vendor communities.
In case you enjoy the acronyms that are so plentiful in this and many businesses, Copyright Clearance Center is a member of:
- The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
- The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)
- The International Association of STM Publishers (STM)
- The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP)
Financial terms of CCC’s acquisition of Ringgold were not immediately disclosed to the news media.
More from Publishing Perspectives on Copyright Clearance Center is here, more on identifiers is here, more on the ISBN is here, more on the ISNI is here, and more from us on mergers and acquisitions is here.
More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.