ORCID: relevant content on this site

The business of unique identification

Talat Chaudhri — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:58:26 +0000

What need is there for unique identifiers?

Put in relatively non-technical language, there is an increasing concern in information science in general to uniquely identify different things, organisations or people that could otherwise be confused, whether on the Internet or in the physical world. In technical terms, these are all referred to as resources (even if people might find it vaguely demeaning in normal language to be considered as such). This need, whether real or perceived in any particular context, has grown as the complexity of information available on the Web has grown almost exponentially, increasing the potential for confusing similar resources.

Why aren't names good enough?

1. People

It is not necessarily enough to have a name, since even a relatively unusual combination of names might easily not be entirely unique from a worldwide or even universal perspective: at the basic level, John Steven Smith might be unique in a place called Barton but even if you cross-reference these references, two people with the same name could easily be confused, for example if there are several possible places called Barton.

My own name, Talat Zafar Chaudhri, might appear to be more unique until you realise that these are all fairly common names in the Indian subcontinent and thus in the Indo-Pakistani diaspora, so it is reasonably possible or even fairly likely that another named individual exists with this particular choice of spelling (of which others may exist). I am also Talat Chaudhri, T. Chaudhri, T Chaudhri, T.Z. Chaudhri, TZ Chaudhri and similar variations (with or without spaces and punctuation) that might make it harder to decide which individuals to reconcile as a single individual, especially by machine processing. At least I do not vary the spelling of my surname, but some people may, especially in cases such as my own where other transliterations could be possible: for example, my father previously used the spelling Chaudhry and many others such as Chaudry, Chowdhary and Chowdhuri are equally possible. I understand when companies misspell it, but a computer might not be sure if these were definitely the same person, even if it went to the lengths of calculating a probability for this.

Moreover, people change personal titles (e.g. I have been both a Mr and a Dr and I am occasionally still referred to as the former by companies that do not allow for the latter option); they have multiple, changing work roles and work places, and may be known in multiple contexts, e.g. work, social, voluntary roles and similar. At work, one may have additional roles in various professional bodies, so it may not be apparent who is who. Two people might have the same name in a large professional group, e.g. physicists, and may even produce outputs related to the same subject. Who owns which ones? This is a particular issue for electronically available outputs on the Internet, e.g. publications, educational resources, audio, visual or audiovisual resources and so on.

2. Organisations

The same issue arises for organisations. Can we be sure that a Board of Licencing Control is unique? No. Perhaps it is merely another spelling for the Board of Licensing Control but using a different spelling? What if one, but not all, of these were re-named as Burundian Licencing Control? What if the Board of Licencing Control merged with the Department for Regulatory Affairs under either of these names, a combination, or an entirely new name, yet continued their association with the assets of the originals. De-mergers are likewise possible, and may present issues of uncertain ownership of resources.

Perhaps there are organisations with this name in several countries but serving utterly different purposes, and perhaps one is merely one possible translation of a term into English but used natively in another language. Historical names have been used in multiple contexts that may still be valid, e.g. the Irish Volunteers, and these might need to be kept clearly separate from each other. Conversely, there are also organisations that have multiple names or forms of names, whether in one language or in multiple languages or during their history, e.g. Óglaigh na hÉireann is Irish for both the terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA) and most of its subsequent splinter groups but is also, however, an acceptable name, for historical reasons, for the Defence Forces of the Republic of Ireland, and previously just the Irish Army (an tArm) that now forms a part of it. These are clearly not the same and must be distinguished. It must be also noted that typographical constraints and character encodings will lead to yet more duplicate forms.

Isn't this bigger than the question of unique identification?

Yes, the need for complex metadata to express these things can go far beyond merely identifying resources in a unique manner. However, before one can even start thinking about complex descriptive and relational metadata, one first has to be clear which resource is mentioned: hence the first step must be unique identification of what it is we are talking about. Only once we have done that can we feel reasonably confident about talking about how resources relate to one another and how they may have changed over time.

Overall, there is an ever increasing need to make clear what is meant, as more and more things and agents have on-line identities that need to be distinguished, whether this is as an owner of resources or as a referrant within a resource, e.g. the subject of the resource in a particular context, and even of the role played and the relationship to other resources or agents, perhaps in a specific time period. Information models can quickly become extremely complex, and this is certainly true where identity is concerned.

What is an identifier?

In concept, an identifier is similar in its basic concept to a name. At its most basic, an identifier in the context of an information system is a token (usually a number or a string of characters) used to refer to an entity (anything which can be referred to). Identifiers are fundamental to most, if not all, information systems. As the global network of information systems evolves, identifiers take on a greater significance. And as the Web becomes more 'machine readable', it becomes vital for all organisations who publish Internet resources to adopt well-managed strategies for creating, maintaining and consistently using identifiers to refer to those assets it cares about.

What are unique identifiers?

The simple answer is that this is the only way to avoid misidentification confidently, and therefore prevent any errors about ownership or rights over resources that might arise, as well as making sure that large bodies of resources contain reliable information generally.

The fundamental question is whether the identifier or token that has been chosen is unique and how best to ensure this. Some identifiers are so complex that mathematical probability makes them effectively unique in the universe, notably UUIDs. In essence, a UUID is no more than a complex numerical token: it is only additional complexity (and thus uniqueness) that it offers compared to, for example, a running number. Others like names can only be distinguished unambiguously by making a series of statements about which names are considered equivalent, which contexts (e.g. a person's work or town) are valid, and so on, where a number of relationships have to be attached to a particular identifier and checked in order to reach an acceptable level of uniqueness and to eliminate any mistaken connections with resources that might be similar in name or perhaps also in other respects by chance.

The problem with UUIDs is that, while the chances of them failing to be unique are, to all practical purposes, non-existent, it is not very clear from a UUID alone what the nature of that resource is. It may be machine-readable but it says nothing about who generated that identifier and when, or which other identifiers might exist for the same resource in different systems that also generated an identifier for the same resource. Consequently, the need to associate other metadata with any complex number or other similar token remains (including but not limited to UUIDs). Simply, no single token can be sufficient for any complex purpose and, at the very least, an electronic or physical resource must be referenced for the token to have any useful meaning at all.

This is effectively that a URL is: another type of token. While I will not go into the whole discussion about URLs and URNs as sub-types of URIs, it is worth noting that, in many quarters, the term URL is no longer preferred despite it being the most commonly used in practice. In strict terms, there is a clear difference: while a URI is usually resolvable to an electronic resource, which may be either a description of a physical or electronic resource or may be an electronic resource itself, there is technically no requirement that a URI should be resolvable, i.e. that all it needs to be is a token that doesn't necessarily have to represent an address that actually delivers a resource. However, it is usual to use the HTTP scheme, which is designed for delivering such a resource, so it would be somewhat eccentric and misleading if one were deliberately to choose an ostensibly resolvable syntax that does not in fact resolve. In effect, virtually all such URIs are also URLs (unless a resource has become unavailable and link rot has set in), since the latter must locate the resource or representation of it: this is inherently useful. Any URI that resolves, i.e. URL, will be effectively unique within the standard Domain Name System (DNS). As a result, there is no absolute need for UUIDs in many contexts, since a sufficiently unique and practical token already exists in the URI. Any unique but arbitrary token serves the core purpose here.

Aren't identifiers really just names?

Yes and no. Names are intrinsically arbitrary too when they are first given. However, they are identifiable on a number of levels from a human perspective. In addition to a combination of names belonging to one or more particular linguistic and/or ethnic origins and usually identifying gender, they quickly become associated with a particular person, so their use in uniquely identifying that person within a given context become central to maintaining the person's reputation in whatever they do. This is, for example, particularly important to academics in Higher Education. In modern times, this name resolution needs to be done globally wherever the Internet is the context, whereas previously it would have been possible to use fewer additional pieces of information in more restricted contexts (e.g. a village, a country etc), depending on the purpose. These different contexts still co-exist but it is now necessary to provide as many as possible, since one cannot control or predict why the information is being requested in each instance on a global system such as the Internet.

How does this affect Higher and Further Education?

Increasing numbers of professionals and the bodies that they work for and represent need to describe their resources on the Internet, whether those are in themselves electronic resources, whether they are descriptions of electronic or physical resources (metadata), or whether they are other representations of physical resources, perhaps in addition to themselves being electronic resources (e.g. photographs). This is a particularly pressing issue in Higher Education and, to an increasing extent, in Further Education. Academic outputs may include publications, educational resources, visual, audio and audiovisual resources and so on. Perhaps the best known is the issue of scholarly publications, partly through the rise of the Open Access movement to make such resources freely available.

There are already a range of identifiers for academics and related professional university staff. One of the problems is that these are created for specific purposes that only cover whichever subset of staff is relevant to those purposes. For example, HESA keeps records that contain a HESA number for academic staff, which means that at least those who have published academic outputs will have such a number. Another number called the HUSID number is maintained for students, since tracking academic careers from student to staff is one important concern for HESA. Many academics in relevant fields may have ISNI numbers, which are used widely in the media content industries. Many academics will have one or more professional staff pages, including within repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), each with a URI, not to mention OpenIDs and URIs associated with Web services which they use professionally and/or privately, e.g. LinkedIn, Academic.edu, Facebook, Twitter and so on.

Here are some examples belonging to Brian Kelly of UKOLN:

The problem is that the coverage of these numbers is not universal within the HE sector, and there is no single recognised authority or other agreement to prevent and resolve conflicts where information is not consistent between two or more information sources.

At present, the JISC are trying to solve this through the Unique Identifiers Task and Finish Group, which also includes representatives of HESA, HEFCE, the various Research Councils in the UK and UKOLN. The preferred solution is currently the ORCID academic identifier, which is being developed internationally with publishers, with a great deal of input from the United States in particular.

In order to succeed, any such identifier will need international penetration of the higher education sector, since academics will not use it unless it delivers the sorts of interoperability benefits that make their work easier and become integrated into the recognised systems required of them by funders and publishers in the course of their work. Since students and academics change roles and institutions, this needs to be recognised and outputs properly allocated to institutions and departments, which may themselves change identities, merge and de-merge over time.

While institutions will need to reduce the workload on academics by bulk loading information about staff, since the main incentive to use the system is that every academic has a record, there is also an issue about control. Should academics have the ability to alter their records at will? Are assertions automatically trusted or does a particular record for an academic's time at an institution need to be verified by that trusted body? Who should maintain a list of trusted bodies who can back up assertions? How will this effort be funded sustainably? It becomes clear that some of these points are central structural concerns whereas others may cover only fringe issues such as avoiding deliberate falsification, which may be rare.

Proprietary academic identifiers

There are also a number of proprietary identifiers associated with different commercial services related to electronic publishing and related academic service industries. Thomson Reuters and Elsevier provide identities for individuals and organisations as part of their bibliographic and academic services; similarly, search services such as Google Scholar (see the study in this blog post) and Microsoft Academic Search have also started to offer identifiers (see this blog post). There may be privacy issues, for example in Google and Microsoft publicly surfacing information about researchers without explicit consent: while this information might have been suitable for the limited purpose of publication, academics may not have intended for it to be synthesised into a single, public description of their personal details available to all.

Some of these services introduce new problems, since their primary purpose is commercial and it is often less of a priority to deal with the internal issues facing academic institutions unless that impacts significantly on the ability to make commercial profit. These may be resolved over time or be reintroduced as services change and compete: the academic has little or no control over the effects of commercial decisions upon their work. For example, Microsoft Academic Search often misrepresents outputs as belonging to similarly named individuals (thus is currently failing at unique identification) and, by default, requires the manual input of researchers to edit out errors and take a proactive approach towards managing the information about themselves. This brings the overall quality of data into question: for large-scale statistical purposes, this could be tolerable, depending on the degree of error; however, for academic citations and reporting purposes such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), it would not be acceptable to use this data without further refinement, which would most likely remain a long, manual process.

Software and services

Any software application layer, whether operated by commercial companies, higher educational institutions, funders or governmental bodies, needs to be maintained. If information is harvested or processed automatically, it needs to be clear who corrects information where errors are found and what the resources are for academics to contact individuals with the time and effort available to improve the data as part of their work. In the case of commercial organisations, this is usually unclear and may change. There is no guarantee that the commercial reason for providing services will continue over time, unlike in most cases in the public sector within Higher Education. Coverage of such commercial services is often geared towards institutions rather than individuals: for example, Google Scholar requires registration using a valid university email address that it recognises, which would exclude private scholars and perhaps some retired staff who produce research.

The Web of Things

It has already been mentioned that electronic descriptions or other representations of physical objects may be found on the internet, including written descriptions, pictures, geographical locations, dimensions and so on. It is even possible to describe physical objects that were extant but are now historical, or which have moved or whose location is now unknown, referencing comparable objects and linking these descriptions with other resources that are related. In each case, the nature of the relationship, relevant agents who may have been responsible for it, and when it was valid can be described in metadata.

This opens the way for the Web of Things, a term used to describe that part of the Semantic Web that covers physical resources as opposed to, or as well as, purely electronic ones. Some authorities use the term to mean physical objects with miniaturised electronic devices to enable them to be located, whereas others merely mean any physical object that is described in a record on the Web. It may be argued that all electronic resources have relationships to physical ones, even if that is only with regard to authorship and subject. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides a means to describe these relationships and transmit information about them in ways readable to humans and machines. Although these are usually expressed as triples, where two things are described with a relationship between them, metadata structures such as the Common European Research Information Framework (CERIF) can add link tables that give far more detailed information about the relationships themselves. All of this can be made available as Linked Data and surfaced in many software applications on the Web.

The Semantic Web is often seen as a utopian view of a future where no electronic resources will be published without complex information being provided or automatically generated about its origins. The reality is that manual entry of information is generally very limited unless it serves the purposes of the person entering it, and this cannot be relied upon as an approach to ensuring large-scale, consistent metadata on a sufficient scale for the Semantic Web to work. Technology has in some cases improved to the extent that geographical and technical information is now automatically produced, for example in digital cameras and in mobile phones able to record GPS coordinates.

However, the effort and cost required to catalogue the entire physical world and the extent to which this is even possible is highly doubtful. Where the Semantic Web could be useful is within particular large bodies of data, for example experimental scientific data, publications and so on. In the case of the Web of Things, this could include art collections, photography, archaelogical information, the locations of public institutions and many more. For all of these purposes, it will be necessary to provide unique identifiers for increasingly large numbers of resources, including things and agents, in order to provide complex metadata about them.

Education in the wider world

It has perhaps not been sufficiently investigated how unique identifiers for researchers and other staff in Higher Education will fit into the wider question of unique identification on the Web. Relevant purposes might be:

(1) commercial, for example the identification of companies and individuals owning the rights to photos, music, video or publications, particularly legacy resources of ongoing commercial value in terms of royalties and performance licencing.

(2) governmental, for example biometric information about people, used in border controls, crime prevention and citizenship contexts; or about public or private organisations such as charities, political groups of interest to law enforcement etc. Information about individuals, in particular, may be subject to privacy laws, which will vary between jurisdications.

It is clear that there are interfaces between the various agents and outputs of academic institutions and many other purposes, notably those commercial and governmental activities already described. For example, a foreign student or member of staff seeking a work permit will require institutions and governmental bodies to use personal and citizenship information co-operatively, which will be linked to their academic identity in the course of their work at the institution. Some of this information will be private and some public, so there is an issue about who can see which parts of a particular corpus of Linked Data, requiring authentication protocols and systems.

The extent to which consistency of approach between HE institutions and other sectors and contexts can ever be ensured is moot, since there is of course no single international authority and because any single metadata solution that tried to cover so many diverse purposes would be fatally unwieldy. How different, flexible approaches can be understood by machine processing is perhaps the technological key to how well the Semantic Web will answer these questions in future, both within Higher Education and beyond.

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: 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.