orcid: relevant content on this site

Why should universities care about identifiers?

Talat Chaudhri — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:19:53 +0000

Why do identifiers matter for research?

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter. Clearly, any such strategic decision-maker will long have been aware of the demands of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessor the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in which successful reporting of the best research outputs of university departments is crucial to the on-going funding of the institution. This is particularly central to the work of research-led universities, which is an increasingly competitive sector: even universities that formerly focussed more on teaching than research are increasingly aware of the need to drive up standards of quality research in order to secure additional funding.

The reality of unique identification in research

However, as anyone who has actually engaged with the business of research reporting to any degree will tell you, it is far from a superficial or trivial matter to carry out such an exercise without thinking very carefully about how researchers are identified; moreover, identifying the research groups, departments, projects and institutions that they may have variously belonged to at different times, all of which may have been re-organised on many occasions, is a considerable challenge raising considerable technical as well as organisational issues.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all derives from the scale of research reporting. On such a massive scale, it has to be done in a systematic way across higher education institutions in order to be useful. Any lack of a systematic approach in collecting the information on the institutional level will inevitably result in higher costs in processing the information later into a useful form, for example by governmental organisations such as HESA and the Research Councils (RCUK) relevant to each area of academic study. This may be carried out for a variety of reasons, amongst them for example:

The need to produce statistics at a national and at an institutional level in order to gauge how successful different parts of the research community are performing in comparison to each other and to similar institutions internationally, which may be a determinant of how funding is allocated.
The production of good, widely accessible information about the work of academic researchers and research groups for the purposes of future research, both in identifying research as a basis for future work and for guiding individuals and groups in terms of who they might work with in future, who their competitors may be, and in creating wider bibliographic information for a whole range of related purposes related to future publications.
Open Access, an increasing requirement imposed by funders where research is publicly funded.
Accountability in the use of public funds for research.

It is precisely the lack of a national approach to providing consistent metadata about individuals and groups connected with research that raises costs, creates inefficiencies and frustrates the development of new software functionality that makes the jobs of research managers more difficult and ultimately reduces the funds available to research and their best use within the sector. It is therefore the business of senior managers of academic research to care about identifiers.

Researcher identifiers: a crucial first step

Before any wider metadata about research may be considered, the most fundamental issue is identifying individuals who carry out research. Before this happens consistently on a national level, there is little point addressing the subsequent issue of identifying groups and institutions engaged in research consistently. It is also important to consider any national approach in terms of interoperability with other international approaches wherever possible: while, on the one hand, funders and statistics agencies can only hope to mandate national identifier schemes, at the same time it is clear that research collaboration is cross-institutional and international in scope, in some cases including researchers from numerous countries in one project or even in the production of one individual paper, data set or other research activity. This is the approach that has been taken by the JISC, together with RCUK, HESA and other partners in setting up the Research Identifiers Task and Finish Group, which is due to report in October 2012.

One emerging candidate with cross-sector and international support is the ORCID researcher identifier scheme, whose rapid development in 2011-12 is scheduled to culminate in a public launch in October 2012. There are, of course, existing, widely-used but relatively simple identifiers such as the HESA researcher identifier, and identifiers provided through commercial providers' web interfaces, but thus far these have not provided dependable unique identification. All such identifiers could be linked to a system like ORCID that is designed on interoperable principles and is not dependant on any particular software platform or web interface. An alternative approach is taken by the ISNI number: whereas ORCID seeks to offer individual researchers and institutions the ability to manage their data on a distributed model, ISNI represents a centrally moderated, bibliographic approach led by national libraries and other similar institutions with national and strategic responsibilities. It remains to be seen whether these different approaches are in competition or whether they will offer different but complementary functionality within the sector, and much may be dependent on how software vendors implement them.

Current Research Information Systems (CRIS)

It is not simply a matter of tracking publications and other related ouputs, for example in institutional repositories. This part of the equation is by now relatively well established in the UK HE sector, although it continues to develop: the issues surrounding Open Access, for example, have not been fully resolved. This, however, is just at the level of the final outputs of research and does not provide anything like sufficient insight into the processes of research, the projects and groups carrying out, the staff involved or the costs. Traditionally, this information has been gathered in a very long-winded process that is individual to each institution's particular workflows and processes (although there are obviously great similarities of approach between them), often a partly paper-based exercise that has been migrated to an extremely varied range of systems and databases, few of which are interoperable or complete. Many departments may be involved in the process apart from the institution's research office and the department in which the researchers are based, but perhaps the most significant would be the finance office, the human resources department and the library, to name just the key players. It will be necessary to keep some information confidential, e.g. personal staff information, salaries and so forth, to share some information internally and with research funders, and to publish other information, e.g. in a research repository that forms the institution's "shop window" of public outputs, library databases and so forth. The term Research Information Management (RIM) has emerged to cover all of these information gathering and information processing activities.

In order to do this systematically, more sophisticated research information management software has been developed, often known as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). The market in the HE sector is currently led, in terms of the number of institutions adopting the software, by PURE, produced by ATIRA; other major players are Symplectic Elements, and CONVERIS, produced by AVEDAS. More recent entrants to this market are Thomson Reuters' Research in View. There are currently no open source products, although a JISC-funded modular approach by the Research Management and Administration Service (RMAS) project may have an increasing impact in this area, depending on subsequent adoption by HE institutions. It is not an overstatement to say that HE institutions are currently in a rush towards early adoption of these CRIS systems, motivated by the need to use research data to compete with each other for funding opportunities.

Next steps: organisational identifiers

In the next 2-3 years, it is likely that the matter of unique researcher identification will be resolved through the emergence of a dominant standard that has sufficient take-up and leverage in the UK and international HE sector to faciliate the work of research institutions and funders. Following this, there will be organisational structures associated with research that will require unique identification, often on a multi-layed basis: for example, a project may be at several institutions, perhaps internationally, and their staff may be in various departments or similar units whose names have changed or have been merged or de-merged at various times, all of which will require careful date and time stamping to make the information reliable for the period that it covers. There will be issues related to copyright, commercialisation and spin-off companies that make the precise provenance of research critical to the future success of academic research and development. Standards for organisational indentifiers are therefore the next important issue on the horizon. Like researcher identification standards, research managers and senior managers with strategic responsibility for research will need to keep abreast of this rapidly developing area.

Draft ORCID API is now open for viewing!

Ben O'Steen — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:57:00 +0000

The API draft is now available for public viewing and covers:

Levels of privacy and other contextual terminology.
Public query API by way of illustrative HTTP query dialogues.
Protected Data query via OAuth.
- OAuth Workflow is illustrated in some depth

This is a pre-release of the API; it is nearly there, but it would be foolish to assume that the API will not change if any difficulties arise or if a better way is agreed upon.

Google Doc version of API:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hEHwKEpQ3wH-qmgmQAgdxdcEIG1jmv6e2-FgdEfW89I/edit?hl=en_GB

As the document is ‘view-only’, you cannot comment on it directly. Please post queries and observations to the ORCID Researcher Google group.

NB Posting a comment here will not directly reach the other members of the ORCID board.

ORCID Outreach Event at CERN

Ben O'Steen — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:23:00 +0000

Program

10:00 Welcome and what’s new – Howard Ratner, ORCID Chair (Slides [PPTX 2.55Mb])

Talk discussed:

Key quote “ORCID will work to support the creation of a permanent, clear and unambiguous record of scholarly communication by enabling reliable attribution of authors and contributors”

Re-statement of the 10 ORCID principles

Various demographics and participant statistics

Illustration of how the Trusted Partners can give more weight to the assertions made in a profile by a researcher by ‘agreeing’ (same_as):

An overview of other researcher ID initiatives and some bullet points on why they feel ORCID is different:

Only not-for-profit contributor identifier initiative dedicated to an open and global service focused on scholarly communication

ORCID is backed by a non-profit organization with over 250 participants behind it

ORCID is backed by many different stakeholders

Publishers are an important ORCID stakeholder but are just one part

ORCID is serious about building an open system

ORCID is the only researcher identifier that is not limited to discipline, institution or geographic area

ORCID is the one to bridge them all by registering the identifiers of all other relevant standalone services (silos big and small)

10:30 What ORCID already does and will do next – Brian Wilson and Geoff Bilder for the Technical Working Group (Slides [PPTX 3.8Mb])

Talk covered:

Development approach, timeline and progress overview

Discussion of the form of ORCIDs as URLs

Overview of what the Query API will provide (non-technical)

Details of the VIVO/ORCID collaboration and code resulting from that.

11:00 Open Q&A on the above

11:30 Cool, but who’s going to pay for that – Craig Van Dyck and Ed Pentz for the Business Working Group (Slides [PPTX 1.19Mb])

Talk covered:

Details of the financial models and projections for the ORCID project

Expected cost to institutions, publishers and funders

$2.75 million required as investment capital (to be paid back after the project breaks even)

13:30 ORCID and me: synergies – Each followed by animated discussion with the audience

ORCID and researchers – Cameron Neylon, STFC

Cameron’s key points were:

Without giving researchers total control over their data and their profile, the system will fail. This includes the power to not list works and co-authorship that the researcher does not want to show.

The most authoritative information you have about a researcher, WILL be from the researcher. Not the institution, not the publisher, but the researcher. It is up to them to specify what is ‘true’ or not.

Researchers wanted three things:

Online profiles that could be used to generate CVs (as maintenance-free as possible) – “It should just know about what articles I publish”

Tracking and aggregation of non-standard outputs in repositories (eg Data, software). This also relates to an identifier being used as a marker that I can use to say “This is a scholarly output for me” even on non-traditional outputs (eg blog posts)

And this is the key. Automating and simplifying grant submissions systems but critically manuscript submission systems. That got clearly the most votes, is probably actually the most tractable and offers the most opportunity for immediate traction with researchers.

ORCID and data – Jan Brase, DataCite (Slides [PPT 0.5Mb])

Provided an overview of DataCite and why it exists (no current convention for citing datasets, attributing impact to them or linking them to the articles which use them)

“DataCite is part of ORCID as ORCID is a community, DataCite is about linking all types of scientific content together, and author identification is one of the key issues”

DataCite search interface: http://search.datacite.org/ui

An example PANGAEA dataset (NB not the one used in presentation unfortunately): http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.733100

ORCID and funding agencies – Carlos Morais-Pires, European Commission (Slides [PDF])

Provided the EU context for FP8, and where ORCID and related efforts may fit within the overall strategy, including overarching figures and funding information.

No questions were raised immediately following this talk, but it did give a very good context to the levels of money that the EU is pushing into this area.

ORCID and your university library – Consol Garcia, Biblioteca del Campus del Baix Llobregat (a Prezi which I cannot find online, may be private)

Provided a good illustration of why the ‘first name, last name’ paradigm falls flat for many cultures and languages.

Asked many questions about what ORCID may do to help libraries but also how it could fit within library practices as they currently stand.

[Ben: Fundamentally, it raised more issues about current library practices and its shortfalls than what a global id for researchers could do]

ORCID and your repository – Najko Jahn, Universität Bielefeld

The presentation gave an overview as to the work they had been doing for the past year or more on their repository. They had already begun to tackle the author disambiguation problem, assigning IDs to authors and so on. Librarians suggest which works to attribute to researchers, and the researchers were able to simply confirm or deny that the work was authored by them. They had done so for approximately 300 of their researchers.

The key question he posed at the end was “What would adopting ORCID do for my repository?” which is a perfectly valid question, given the work they had already undertaken to disambiguate. The discussion was slow, but eventually focussed on the difference in scope – their researcher IDs were locally valid without a widely understood API to query about them, and an international ID system would have a global scope, with effort being made so that the API is as simple but useful as possible.

ORCID and your journal – Brian Hole – Ubiquity Press

Talked about how ORCID may work with a small, independent publisher and what made them different from others (publishing by researchers, for researchers)

ORCID Executive Update (Sept 11)

Ben O'Steen — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:50:00 +0000

ORCID in a nutshell (current strategy):

ORCID is a registry of profiles for people involved in research – a profile can be created by the person themselves (self-registry) or by what is termed a Trusted Partner, such as a University or Publisher.
The people using the system decide who is and is not a researcher, not the system itself.
A self-registered profile, for “John Smith” for example, can state that it is the same ‘John Smith’ in a profile created by a Trusted Partner and vice-versa. (akin to the semantic web’s “sameAs”)
Profiles which are linked like this in both directions (researcher to trusted partner and back again) are trusted more than a profile without such verifying claims.
Profile data can have varying levels of privacy: fields can be made public (anyone can see the data), protected (only those that a researcher authorises can see the data) or private (only the researcher can see it). It is expected that when profiles are linked in the above manner, the researcher’s privacy settings will cover the data submitted by the other parties too (but this mechanism is by no means confirmed or implemented yet.)
A researcher will be able to authorise other parties to access their protected data using a scheme called OAuth. This is a simple process for the user, and requires little to be remembered on their part. An example Twitter OAuth authorisation can be seen in the first 30 seconds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhrbmUbF0IE - blink and you’ll miss it.
The main selling point for the system at this time is that it is attempting to save a researcher’s time spent filling in publisher and funder forms for article and bid submissions by having the pertinent details automatically drawn from their ORCID profile (once the publisher/funder’s system has been authorised via the aforementioned OAuth)
The later selling point, when a tipping point of signed up users is reached, is expected to be for the universities, funders and publishers. The ability to draw up an REF return or to see which publications have been made as a result of which project funding is an expected feature.
It is expected that usable ORCIDs will be assigned from Q2 2012

Money:

(much of the following is taken from Ed Pentz’s powerpoint presentation: http://orcid.org/sites/default/files/bwgsep11.pptx WARNING: new Powerpoint required to view.)

Current projections suggest that the ORCID system will require operating costs of around $2.1 million a year for the next few years.
The organisation has approximately 6 months left of funding capital left to work with and is on a funding drive at this moment.
It is looking to follow in other CrossRef project’s footsteps by asking publishers and the like for loans – it projects that it will reach the break-even point in 5 to 6 years.
No researcher is going to pay for access to the service to create and use a profile and its ID.
The Trusted Partners are expected to pay – what the value-added services might be for these parties are still in discussion.
- The 5 to 6 years break-even point is based on what seems to be a conservative uptake by these parties – however, the system still needs to be sold to them! The following figures are extremely preliminary (tiering is based on number of people/size of organisation):

[Ben: Just repeating - these figures are pre- pre- pre-alpha and subject to change at the drop of a hat. In fact, I'd bet that they already have]

Things yet to be dealt with (my opinion):

Whilst no-one has stated a problem with ORCID’s software being Open Source, it has yet to be released as an Open Source Project. The code base that they are working on, IP belonging to Thomson-Reuters, has been scrubbed of any Thomson-Reuters specific code and they (T-R) have agree that it is suitable to be placed under an OSI licence. It just hasn’t been done yet.
The ORCID software release was planned to be just a deployable .war file – without source code. This obviously is not acceptable if the O in ORCID is to remain to stand for Open (in spirit if not pedantically.)
How privacy is to be handled with multiple parties asserting various pieces of information is not yet decided or agreed upon. This type of functionality is quite a deal-breaker for many academics.
How malicious or false claims are going to be dealt with, at a policy level, has not been clear. What level of recourse will an individual have against false claims made (mistakenly) by a trusted partner and vice-versa? Researchers making multiple accounts? Profiles made by bored teenagers for ‘fun’?
There is still a short-term gap of investment funding required of $2.75 million dollars – it remains to be seen what occurs if the code is still not made open source by the end of six months if no other sources of capital is found.
Whilst other identifier schemes can be easily included within an ORCID profile, it is not clear if – at an organisational level – if they would be happy if another organisation used the ORCID code to set up another ‘ORCID’ system. Due to the timeline of when ORCID might go live (Q2 2012), the urgency with which other organisations require them might force other systems to be put into place much earlier. For example, as Andrew Treloar jokingly quoted on the ORCID outreach event’s live chat: “If you guys have an ORC-ID, then I want an ELF-ID” – could the next ORCID-free six months force some funders to take matters into their own hands?
ORCID exit-strategies – both for the organisation and for individual profiles. What happens when the money runs out? What happens to the data? If someone wanted ‘out’, is there a way for them to remove all their data and take it with them? (in a similar vein to http://www.dataliberation.org/)
The authorisation system relies on OAuth (which is no bad thing) but I don’t think that the time required for existing organisation to adopt this has been adequately estimated. ORCIDs use on other systems to save time and effort filling in forms is a crucial part of the ‘sales pitch’ to academics – this hasn’t gotten the visible focus I would’ve expected.

ORCID – a taster of the API

Ben O'Steen — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:09:00 +0000

As the official draft API (googledoc) is both in flux and read-protected so that only those invited can see it, I am unable to give you a complete view of how things are shaping up.

However, I can relay a number of key points that everyone involved is concerned about:

It must have sensible (some may say RESTful) URLs
Human and machine-readable data is a must via
- Content-negotiation,
- and optionally, “suffix” negotiation (adding a “.xml” or “/xml”) for convenience.
OAuth is the current plan to share trust, allowing users the greatest control over what and who has access to their live profile data.
Profile creation/editing “By Proxy” is important, but shouldn’t take any control of the researcher’s basic profile information from the researcher themselves.

Some code!

Gudmundur A. Thorisson (University of Leicester and a member of the ORCID Technical Advisory Group) has put together an emulation of certain portions of the ORCID API, including some of the OAuth parts:

https://github.com/gthorisson/orcid-sandbox

Get the code from github and making sure you already have Rails/Ruby installed:

$ cd orcid-sandbox $ bundle install $ bundle exec rake db:migrate $ bundle exec rake db:setup $ rails server -p 3001 -d

(you may need “$ scripts/rails server -p 3001 -d)

Once you have the code up and running, you should be able to log in, make accounts and so on.

# OAuth-protected access to profile
[mummi@cambozola-2]curl  http://localhost:3001/profile -H "Accept: text/xml"  -I
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
X-Ua-Compatible: IE=Edge
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:20:50 GMT
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/1.8.7/2009-06-12)
X-Runtime: 0.087887
Content-Length: 0
Cache-Control: no-cache

# Public access to profile
[mummi@cambozola-2]curl  http://localhost:3001/cid/0723-1814-6587-5983 -H "Accept: text/xml" -I
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Ua-Compatible: IE=Edge
Etag: "390c3560fce0064d65dd1373799f13d0"
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:20:49 GMT
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/1.8.7/2009-06-12)
X-Runtime: 0.035443
Content-Length: 0
Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate

# Sample response (from Mike's XML examples)
[mummi@cambozola-2]curl  http://localhost:3001/cid/0723-1814-6587-5983 -H "Accept: text/xml"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<orcid-bio-response xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.orcid.org/ns/orcid_bio_response_1.0.xsd"
    xmlns="http://www.orcid.org/ns/bio_response"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <response_version>1.0</response_version>
    <response_summary>
        <submission-date>09-10-2012 15:50:01</submission-date>
        <completion-date>09-10-2012 15:50:07</completion-date>
        <total-researchers-found>1</total-researchers-found>
        <!-- error message, if applicable -->
        <!-- unable to connect to ORCID, no matching researchers etc -->
        <error-desc>No researcher found for this institution.</error-desc>
    </response_summary>
    <profileList>
        <researcher-profile>
            <!--  ORCID elements will be present for every researcher found -->
            <orcid>XXXXXXXXXXXXXX</orcid>
            <!-- In short, researcher has claimed the profile if confirmed=true-->
            <confirmed>true</confirmed>
            <firstName>Josiah</firstName>
            <lastName>Carberry</lastName>
            <middleName>Stinkney</middleName>
            <other-names>
                <other-name>J. Carberry</other-name>
                <other-name>J. S. Carberry</other-name>
            </other-names>
            <researcher-urls>
                <url>http://library.brown.edu/about/hay/carberry.php</url>
                <url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_S._Carberry</url>
                <url>http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/search.php?serial=C0070</url>
            </researcher-urls>
            <institution>
                <name>Brown University</name>
                <address>
                        <addressLine1>38 Brown Street / Box 1920</addressLine1>
                        <city>Providence</city>
                        <state-or-province>Rhode Island</state-or-province>
                        <country>United States</country>
                        <postalcode>02912</postalcode>
                    </address>
                <departmentName>Psychoceramics</departmentName>
                <departmentName>High Energy Metaphysics</departmentName>
                <role>Researcher (Academic)</role>
                <start-date>1929</start-date>
            </institution>
            <bulk-institution>Brown University</bulk-institution>
            <sponsor>Brown University Library</sponsor>
            <affiliate-institution>
                <name> Wesleyan University</name>
                <address>
                        <addressLine1>Wesleyan University</addressLine1>
                        <addressLine2>Czech-Republic</addressLine2>
                        <city>Middletown</city>
                        <state-or-province>Connecticut</state-or-province>
                        <country>United States</country>
                        <postalcode>06459</postalcode>
                    </address>
                <departmentName>Bilocation</departmentName>
                <role>Researcher (Academic)</role>
                <start-date>1930</start-date>
            </affiliate-institution>
        </researcher-profile>
    </profileList>
</orcid-bio-response>

ORCID: some questions and answers

Ben O'Steen — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:38:00 +0000

The following is from an email exchange with Nicky Ferguson. These are my answers to the questions
he posed, and as such shouldn’t be considered the opinion of the ORCID project itself. They are the
answers I believe are correct, based on the meetings and discussions I have been part of on the
technical advisory group.

If any other member of the advisory group can correct any inaccuracies in the comments, I’d be
most appreciative.

> 1. ISNI, ORCID, VIAF etc … will they each or should they be a
> subset of UUID, in a world where there is a need for identifiers for
> all sorts of things from lab notebooks to datasets to institutions, as
> well as researchers?

ORCID and VIAF have both plumped for a ‘short’ number and a verbal
prefix (eg VIAF ID: 747462). It is intended (eventually) that the profile
corresponding to a given ORCID should be able to be found from
an ORCID site, and not necessarily the ORCID site.

You can currently construct URLs for both
where that ID number is used as a suffix to do a lookup on that
researcher/author/etc, with effort and consideration being made so
that the URL prefix will not change in the near future. It is naive to
think that any URL prefix that will never, ever change but keeping the
URL usable for as long as humanly possible is given serious thought.

With UUIDs, you will have to do something identical as there is no DNS
lookup *system* for them but a handful of individual sites that record
links as it suits them. Due to the UUID range being so large, the key
advantage of the scheme is that given a suitably random manner to
generate them, collisions between UUIDs made on separate systems are
incredibly rare. I’m not sure that anyone has recorded a collision
yet, (disregarding those due to poorly configured entropy pools on
virtual machines) This means that it is perfectly reasonable to
generate UUIDs for things completely independently of any central
organising body, and so makes them very cheap and long-lasting.

People do not like them however – subjectively – they do not like them
as part of visible URLs, they do not like them as identifiers to
wield, and they do not like identifiers for themselves that they
cannot remember by rote.

> 2. Who decides who is a researcher? In the UK some universities call
> all their members of staff ”teacher/researchers”, others make a clear
> distinction. What about schoolchildren who jointly author a paper?
> What about researchers in charities or industry who may never author a
> paper. What about peer-reviewers and research “users”?

ORCID currently is an “Allow then Deny Later” system. The main
‘ORCID’ site will be a self-signup website (with an initially limited
ability for proxies to sign up and create and amend profiles for others)
and the ‘researcher-iness’ of profiles will not be policed as there is no need to,
unless the profile claims something untruthful.

The core of the system is based on trust – if a person claims an institutional affiliation,
that will be marked as untrusted until that institution
verifies this. If an institution or research group doesn’t verify the
data, care is being taken that this is displayed as clearly as
possible.

There is no need to police people, only to police the claims they make
about themselves and the works they claim to have a hand in
publishing.

>
> 3. Even institutions which pride themselves on their research may
> only have 20-30% of their staff who are researchers, how do you sell a
> business case to them that they should alter their systems to
> accommodate an identifier for only a minority of the staff on their
> finance/HR/security systems?

Again, the ORCID system (and to an extent the VIAF system) is geared
to help the researcher – at a basic level, keeping a note of the ID
which a researcher has is all that is required to begin to benefit
from it. I think that due to the well understood pace at which change
occurs within the administrative systems of an institution, the first
meeting at which a business case for change might need to be presented
will occur many, many months after the researchers have adopted the
system for themselves as just part of the academic toolset. And if the
researchers do not find it useful, then it will disappear like so many
of the previous ID systems.

> 4. Similar question about researchers themselves – they have been
> disappointingly reluctant to deposit their papers in repositories and
> to use grant numbers in their publications, even when “mandated” – who
> will design the compelling interfaces which will encourage them to use
> ORCID … in the academic community we don’t have a great track record
> at designing compelling interfaces?

It is not an academic community that is designing the interface for
one – it has already been outsourced to a small team of local
designers and developers that Crossref have had good working
relationships with so there is hope there. The key will be
whether or not the system will save time for the researcher and make
certain tasks that they already do easier.

The API for the ORCID
service is very much the focus at the moment and certain use-cases
have been thought through, such as encouraging publishers and journal
submission processes to use the ID system, rather than get the
researcher (or PA/postgrad by proxy) to fill in all their information
again, as well as bootstrapping the ORCID database with information
already within existing bibliographic databases so that many profiles
need only be claimed and verified, rather than generated anew.

I do not mean to knock the institutional repository scene unduly
(having been an institutional repo person myself) but I have yet to see
more than a few repositories strive to make the researcher’s
lives easier and better. It is worth noting that those repositories
are the one’s that are thriving.

>
> 5. What role would a national registry need to play to map ORCID (or
> a.n.other identifier) with key information? and finally …

In short, include something semantically similar to ‘rdf:seeAlso’
within the database/triplestore/profile for the national registry’s
version of the same person. Many of the codebase changes occurring at
this time are so that the informational claims within other
whitelisted registries can be automatically shown and interpreted
within the ORCID store, moving towards a multi-trust system.

>
> 6. I understand that the idea is that the researchers themselves
> would control the registration and updating processes – but
> institutions, funders and government agencies will surely want to
> maintain their own registries/database using the ID … yes? Is the
> mechanism for change control of personal information thought out?
>

As mentioned above, the changes occurring and being implemented are to
effect a solid multi-trust control system, which will allow for the
kind of distributed profiles you mention to be accepted. However, the
systems have to provide data such that a machine can use it, and that
may be the sticking point for a few of these systems.

ORCID update – ResearcherID system and a call for API

Ben O'Steen — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:53:00 +0000

A quick update:

ORCID service:
- Geoff Bilder (Crossref) is leading the developmental work on the ORCID system
- The first instance of this system will be based on the code produced for the Thomson-Reuters ResearcherID system which has the following characteristics:
  - Java 1.6 (current version is 1.6.021)
  - iBatis 2.3.0.677 (current version is 3.0.2)
  - Struts2
  - Tomcat 5.5.x (current version is 7.0.2)
  - MySQL 5.0.19 (current 5.1.50)
  - Standard XML RPC
  - Quartz Scheduler
ORCID development phases have not changed much since the beginning:
- Phase 1 – create an author ‘self-claim’ system, based on the ResearcherID code but with changes made to accommodate desired APIs and phase 2 integration work.
- Phase 2 – create a multi-trust system – where trusted bodies (institutions) can publish information on ORCIDs they know about and validate and verify the data held on those ORCIDs in other systems.

One key component of this has been the desire to ‘nail-down’ the desired API for access to ORCID profile information as early as possible. The discussions are not occurring on a publically-accessible mailing list yet although I and others have put forward this as something that is highly desirable if not essential.

In the meantime, I would welcome any API ideas, desires or queries that I can take to the ORCID TAG.

“The path to academic personal identifiers…

Ben O'Steen — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:43:00 +0000

… is littered with the wrecks and remains of many failed projects.”

The varied attempts to start, maintain or promote a single identifier scheme for academics, whether applied locally or internationally, can arguably be described as being a mix of successes and abject failures. I do not wish to dwell on what a failure is in this respect, but wish to simply define it as being a scheme that is not seen to be a necessary part of an academic’s ‘life’ – that of research, producing outputs, self-promotion, discovery of work and communicating with their collegues and the wider world.

It is far more instructive to look at the schemes that have worked in academia, and also at schemes which a broader section of the population have adopted. The first case that is most instructive is that of RePEc -

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 74 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available. Participation in RePEc as a provider only involves the cost of your time in preparing and maintaining metadata describing your publications.

Why is RePEc an important service to consider?

The service(s) were created and later shaped due to the needs of its community by volunteers – started by Thomas Krichel in 1993 (in every practical sense), the team has grown over the years.
It is a great example of a ‘bottom-up‘ (from the authors/peer group) service, not a ‘top-down’ service (institutional/publishing org driven.)
Being a product of the community, there is a great deal of trust in the services. The barrier to interaction with the site is low.
It has provided community-policed freedom for Economists to create and garden their own profiles for a number of years - http://authors.repec.org - the service now has over 25,000 author profiles, added primarily by the authors themselves and it is loosely labelled an Author ‘CV’ on the front page of the RePEc website.
- “The RePEc Author Service aims to link economists with their research output in the RePEc bibliographic database.” (more info)
It allows the community of economists to communicate their ideas and discover each other’s related research in a better manner than would be possible without it.
It allows the community to self-promote and compare one author’s output to another’s, based on their profiles and citations.

These are the key points that I think have contributed to making RePEc and its collection of services a success – it addresses the real needs of a community who trust it, who can freely add to and correct information about themselves and it allows them to communicate better, to self-promote and compare themselves to their peers and to discover further related research with greater ease.

Why are the publisher’s not fulfilling this role? One of the key pieces of research currency used by Economists is the Working paper – a paper that by its very nature is subject to revision, alteration and hopefully, amelioration. Unlike some other subjects, it is seen to be important for this ‘imperfect’ work to be scrutinised in a more public manner than other academic cultures might tolerate. A Work (used in the FRBR sense) whose contents will shift from the time of first publication, such that many versions of it may exist, are an anathema to conventional fire-and-forget publishing, where what is published may be retracted or given an errata, but its structure and findings are not expected to change.

Some may refer to this sort of output as ‘grey literature’ – I will give the most current (Prague Definition 2010) below:

“Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.”

Under this definition, working papers do fall into this category, although RePEc does not limit authors to listing only these forms of outputs. I consider the lack of a limit here to provide a greater sense of ownership to the community and another aspect that a successful service would likely emulate.

The fact that RePEc can be considered to be ‘owned’ by a community lends trust to its brand, but that is by no means the only way to garner the trust of a community. It’s actions and developments have won the trust of its community over the years. It is perfectly feasible for a publisher or private entity to produce a service which has similar success in this area. For example, consider the SSRN (Social Science Research Network).

SSRN

Like RePEc, the SSRN was created and shaped due to the needs of its community but in this case, the organisation behind it is privately owned.
It is focussed on the needs of authors and many of its services, if not all of them, are designed to be used by those within the research peer-group
- A somewhat subjective example is from their site’s navigation banner - http://www.ssrn.com/hen/index.html - there are options for ‘Top Papers’ and ‘Top Authors’ but nothing for ‘Top Institution’.
There is a great deal of trust in the services, as the SSRN spend a lot of effort validating, amending and checking the outputs of its services. While the ethereal nature of ‘download statistics’ may be familiar to many of those who run and administer websites, it is treated with great reverence by the users of the SSRN as the organisation expends great time and effort filtering and heavily examining downloads to render this insubstantial statistic less so. It is the appearance of solidity and formality with which the services are delivered that contributes towards the trust of the community.
It allows the community of economists to communicate their ideas and discover each other’s related research in a better manner than would be possible without it.
It allows the community to self-promote and compare one author’s output to another’s, based on their profiles and citations.
It also responds to criticism and errors within its service rapidly, as it is something that it takes pride in.

Many of the points here, mesh with those from RePEc, including the key (IMHO) ones of trust, comparison amongst peers, self-promotion and discovery. It has more limits than RePEc (contributions to the service are less free in the sense of ‘libre‘) but these same limits provide extra trust in the information provided by the service; an air that the information within is policed well and hard to falsify.

Let’s now consider a fundamentally similar service, similar in all of the above, but it is focus is not academic, and it is free only in the sense of it being ‘gratis’ and absolutely not ‘libre’

Facebook

Like RePEc, Facebook was created and shaped due to the needs of a community but it can be stated quite clearly that the community that it primarily serves are not those of its users. A quick glance at their current terms and conditions (or Rights and Responsibilities) can justify that assertion. Look at point 2, subsection 1 for a legal bombshell of a statement that should worry any user uploading personal videos or pictures to the site.
- As people tend to blank out when they are presented with T&C legalese, I’ll copy the pertinent section here: …. photos and videos (“IP content”), …: you grant us [opt-out, not opt-in] a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”)
It is focussed on the needs of users as it gained venture capitol based primarily on numbers of users – a ‘potential’ source of profit, rather than profitability in of itself. The organisation had a drive to gain and retain users, and had to do so by offering useful services.
There is ironically still a great deal of trust in the services they provide – in my opinion, this is because it is a mainstream service whose privacy transgressions and related reports which would erode that trust are never truly treated to mainstream media coverage.
- For example, tabloid newspapers make the UK population aware when the UK government or related bodies lose ‘CDs of valuable data‘ by running frontpage-level story campaigns over the course of days without any information on whether that data is being misused, but I have yet to find stories reported with similar intensity or visibility about the times Facebook openly attempted to sell personal data, finding articles from the Independent, Guardian and the Telegraph, individual articles that I doubt made the front pages of any of those.
- (As an aside, the irony of this Facebook group “We sue facebook if they sell our personal data!”(sic.) provides ample material to mull the issue of trust over: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52991492388 )
Even though the users’ should assess whether they should trust it, Facebook does allow the community of users to communicate and discover each other in a better manner than would be possible without it.
It allows the community to self-promote and socially compare based on their profiles.

Let’s now move swiftly on to consider an arguable failure in this realm – Thomson-Reuters’ ResearcherID:

ResearcherID

It was created primarily due to the needs of a publisher, who needed to keep track of researchers, who published which paper, co-authors and so on. This is actually a direct need of authors as well, but it is a hard notion to convey as each subject area seems to have its own coping mechanisms and acceptable losses when it comes to citations, metrics and the like.
It tried to focus on the needs of the users as well, but without the drive from a community that already existed, it was unclear what its focus is. This is perhaps a compromise between the publisher’s desire to make it as widely applicable as possible, and the individual desire to make it relevant to their own, personal community.
As this was a product by a publishing business, targeted at no specific community, the service inherited much of the same level of trust that the publishing business has within the wider academic community. That is to say, no-one trusted it to remain open and freely reusable without the threat of a hefty subscription introduced at some point later on. Thomson-Reuters own surveys confirmed that the primary reason ResearcherID was under-used was due to a lack of trust, both longterm and short term, in the service.
Without many profiles in the system, it never reached a tipping-point - it wasn’t a useful service to use in order to communicate and discover other researchers in your field of work.
Likewise, the ability to self-promote and compare was never tested, as there simply was not a great enough use of this service to do so.

The key failings of the ResearcherID service was that it did not target any community successfully, instead targeting all academic communities, and that it lacked its users’ trust in the service.

What does this mean for ORCID?

Although ORCID is technically a ‘child’ of the ResearcherID project, it does so with the knowledge of its parent failure and hopefully, as a project, will strive to correct this. While Thomson-Reuters play a part in the ORCID project, they are actively trying to relegate themselves to be no more influential in the proceedings and discussions that of any of the members of the boards administering and plotting out the direction for ORCID.

As a member of the Technical Advisory Group for ORCID, you can be sure that the aspects of trust and of community involvement will be at the forefront of any discussions I have with that group.

Researcher ID Task and Finish Group

Talat Chaudhri — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:42:00 +0000

The first meeting of the Researcher Identifiers Task and Finish Group was highly successful and productive because it kept a tight focus on developing an achievable, clearly articulated body of work and developing a process and timescale for the series of meetings that will inform this process and the commissioning and delivery of the reports that the discussions will continue to inform, round until January 2012.

The aim of the first meeting was to agree set of recommendations and collective requirements for Researcher IDs, decide on who else should form a part of future discussions, and decide on the precise scope and limits that the discussions and commissioned work should stay within. At the end of the discussions and after the conclusions of the reports and consultations, it is intended that the JISC should be in a position to commission a number of clearly defined pieces of work to begin implementation of the recommendations of the group.

The first decision was that only researcher identifiers, not institutional identifiers as well, should be considered as part of this work. The initial discussion reached agreement that, although crucial to many or most areas of research information management, the scope had to remain tighter during the limited time frame of these meetings in order to achieve concrete results rapidly. The question of when a person becomes a researcher for the purposes of the many and varied business processes in the UK HE sector is a complex one, and there was considerable discussion around this point. It was agreed that the work needed to concentrate specifically on the UK HE research information management regime, although it needed to be informed by international developments where that was relevant and appropriate to the UK context.

Many different business processes within universities in the UK HE sector were discussed, including but not limited to pre- and post-award grant management, research reporting, publications management, human resources for research and teaching, student monitoring including postgraduate records, statutory requirements such as Freedom of Information, league tables and government targets, and government open data initiatives. The tension between the needs and professional preferences of the researcher in maintaining control over their information and those of the institution in effectively carrying out these processes across multiple disciplines and departments at a managed, institutional level was a recurring theme in the discussions.

There was a focus on the need for technical interoperability with existing systems, in particular on linked data initiatives, especially where that concerns research data sets. The discussion identified several well known researcher ID schemes such as ORCID, HESA IDs and the 16 digit ISNI number. It was agreed that all of these discussions between stakeholders should be documented as a starting point. Suggestions were taken for which stakeholders were not yet present and who should therefore be invited, and it was agreed in particular that HEFCE needed to be represented in some way, whether or not they would actually commit senior staff time to be represented at the meetings directly. It was also suggested that a representative of the Wellcome Trust could be invited.

In summary, Neil Jacobs stated the overall modus operandi and aims of the group as follows:

The group will meet 5-6 times to develop recommendations.
All apart from the first and last meetings will be virtual meetings using Skype, telephone conference or an alternative technology if appropriate.
The dates of these meetings were to be set out at the end of the meeting (see below), following the discussions about the recommended work packages.
The group will be presented with pre-existing reports, e.g. ORCID and the Names Project, and these groups will be continuously consulted on the basis of feedback from the meetings, in a manner to be established as the need arises. For example, there will be a workshop at the end of the month to outline opportunities in identity management, from which a short briefing will be delivered to the group.
The stakeholders will faciliate discussion and provide information to the group.
Case studies will be used to map out the individual pieces of work that might be done to inform about options, risks, benefits in setting up an identifier infrastructure.
At the end of 6 months the recommendations that can be implemented on the basis of these discussions will be in place.
The final report in January 2011 will take a longer term view: there is no expectation that the infrastructure itself will be in place by then. This will be part of subsequent work and will come out of the recommendations that will be in place by then.

David Flanders then gave a brief summary of developments in the Names Project project, followed by brief summaries given by Brian Kelly of the current state of the ORCID project, and the work on the Technical Foundations (Talat Chaudhri) and ISKB (Thom Bunting) web sites, services and processes being developed by UKOLN staff.

The rest of the meeting was largely devoted to focussed discussions of the required nature and scope of the work packages that had been suggested in the actions from the discussions in the preceding half of the meeting, for which the group separated into two groups and then came back together to discuss and synthesise their findings.

In summary, Neil Jacobs reiterated the need to remain aware of milestones outside of this work, e.g. the REF outline in July 2011 and the final specification in January 2012, as well as JES milestones, in order to avoid being caught out by those developments.The meeting was happy with the provisional shape of the work packages recommended to the JISC for commissioning in order to inform the ongoing series of meetings. Josh Brown agreed to prepare a timeline, and that he, Neil Jacobs and David Flanders will report back at the next meeting once these actions have been carried out.

Finally, dates were agreed for the entire series of meetings. Very considerable progress was made during the meeting in a very short space of time, which was hard but rewarding work that proceeded from an initial position of quite general and all-encompassing discussions in the the area of research management and unique identifiers to a clear, scoped and planned series of provisional work packages and processes for their co-ordination with the ongoing meetings of the group.