A Question about RecID

Projects Invenio RDM
1

Hello all,

In the last telecon, we have talked about RecIDs. IMHO, they are great as an identifier however, I wanted to ask whether RecIDs will be our new primary key for the InvenioRDM. It might be discussed in the telecon or elsewhere but I’ve missed it.

Thanks in advance,
Regards,

Hakan

2

Hi Hakan,

Thanks for attending the telecon!

Yes, in InvenioRDM, the default recids will follow this new format (referred as recid_v2 or “cool recids” in reference to “cool DOIs”): random 10-alphanumeric characters with last 2 digits being a checksum. Nothing prevents you from configuring your instance to use the prior way of generating recids. However, we do hope that all the benefits of that new approach have convinced you to go with it :slight_smile: .

3

Thanks for your detailed reply.

We’re planning to use the new RecID. The core of the question was more related to DOIs. I may not be able to make it clear, sorry.

Since Zenodo is considering DOIs as a mandatory field and using it as the primary identifier around the site; we floated the idea of providing DOIs as Zenodo however, it wasn’t practical for us for various reasons.

Because of our situation, we liked the idea of the new RecID and want to use it as the primary identifier in the site, rendering DOIs optional.

In our case, the user can provide a DOI but, it’s not mandatory, and want to use the RecID as the primary identifier around the site. Will this be possible with this development?

I’m still not very familiar with the complete data structure of InvenioRDM and hope that I’m not misunderstanding it massively.

Thanks again,

Hakan

4

Yes. While I can’t comment on how Zenodo wants to go about using DOI, here is how we see things from the InvenioRDM perspective since that’s what I work on :wink: (and others can correct me if that’s not exact):

When a record is created, a Recid is created (with the new format) and used as its primary identifier. Unless a DOI is passed at record creation (and there are some caveats about managed and unmanaged DOI that I won’t go into here), that Recid is also chosen to be the DOI for that record. We mint a DOI passing that Recid as the value of the DOI-suffix. This is nice: the URL for the record will look similar to the doi.org URL, the DOI-suffix and Recid can mostly be used interchangeably and we can reserve the DOI in advance if the record is not public yet. If a DOI is passed, it is still the Recid that is used as the primary identifier for the record around the site.

Hope that clears things!

5

Hi Guillaume,

Thanks for your answer. This clarifies a lot.

Cheers!