Permanence of the Scholarly Record: Persistent Identification and Digital Preservation – A Roadmap

This paper proposes steps towards a roadmap for improving the integration of two communities that deal with persistence and long-term stewardship of digital content. They are Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and Digital Preservation. Both disciplines have made significant progress and practical contributions. Yet their approaches are not fully linked and there is considerable potential to integrate their solution space and to improve either of them by learning from the other. It addresses three core issues:

1.        How does the long-term digital object life-cycle affect PIDs, the entities they identify, and the metadata that describes them?

2.        How can PIDs help long-term preservation?

3.        How can long-term preservation help to shape PID best practice and ensure long-term access to the scholarly record?

We also sketch out initial results of our ongoing work along this roadmap.