Alex @hardistyar and I have been jotting down notes about the allocation of responsibilities for each part of a digital extended specimen. Below are a few of these, but recognize that this is incomplete.
Parts of an openDS & Expected Roles and Responsibilities
PID/Header Info (PID and its PID Record in the Handle System)
Created and maintained by a Handle Registration Agency (RA) acting as an agent on behalf of natural sciences data publishers. The RA captures the authoritative information provided by a data publisher, registers the PID, keeps the PID Record up-to-date, and maintains the connection between the PID/PID Record and the authoritative data. This authoritative information becomes part of the searchable metadata for the purpose of discovery and access.
a. Authoritative information
Generated by a natural sciences data publisher. Includes human-readable* data about the specimen. In the future, this information is expected to be compliant with minimum information requirements (MIDS) and is that commonly found today in Darwin Core with particular emphasis on terms like institutionCode, collectionCode, and catalogNumber that are expected to have stability. Other terms must also be present here that circumscribe the “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when” for the physical specimen. Part of the authoritative information must be an identifier (physicalSpecimenId) and institution (code) details that establishes the connection between the DS and its corresponding physical specimen. Both pieces of information are needed because physicalSpecimenId is not always unique.
Authoritative information cannot be adjusted by any agent except the authority, which is generally expected to be the custodial institution. The authority is expected to synchronize in near real-time this authoritative information with what resides in their local collection management system.
*machine-readable data is also required but who is responsible for preparing this needs further study.
A data publisher is responsible for telling the RA if/when the authoritative data changes, including when the specimen changes its physicalSpecimenId and/or moves to a different institution. In this latter case, this responsibility transfers to the new data publisher. Thus, the RA and the data publisher are contractually jointly responsible for persisting the DS/PS connection. Note, this is the same situation as journal articles and datasets today. The publisher and the RA (Crossref, DataCite) are each responsible for the two different elements - providing the correct metadata and registering the DOI but they are then jointly responsible for dealing with changes.
i. Images
Images are, in general the responsibility of the natural sciences data publisher. However, it is not precluded that third-parties may create images that should be appended to the DS.
s. Supplementary Information
Supplementary information can be added by any appropriately authorized person or organisation.
t. Related Data
Same as supplementary information above.