Maria Gould and Maria Praetzellis (2021). Open Persistent Identifiers: The Building Blocks of Sustainable Scholarly Infrastructure. Research Library Issues 302, 5–18. https://doi.org/10.29242/rli.302.2
„In May 2021, Microsoft circulated an announcement that it would be shutting down its Microsoft Academic Services (MAS) by the end of the year. The news of this decision reverberated through the open- scholarship community, raising questions and concerns among the many stakeholders who relied on the free service for tracking research activities in various contexts. At a time when research discovery is more necessary than ever, it is also becoming more complicated. The work of tracking and identifying publications and other research outputs is taking place in a context of increased technological complexity, competing motivations and priorities, and constrained resources. As exemplified by the Microsoft case, one of the fundamental challenges and risks in the scholarly infrastructure landscape is the unpredictable availability of the platforms and services we rely upon to perform this work. When these platforms and services go away, what do we have left? Such challenges and risks might be overcome or at least mitigated if and when scholarly infrastructure is built with open components that can persist beyond their packaging […]“