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)

Confidence, and the business of persistent identification

Paul Walk — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:48:10 +0000

The persistent identification of resources is a foundational element of the JISC Information Environment. There are several schemes and technologies available to support this, with one of the most prominently used in the JISC IE being the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Built on the Handle technology, the DOI, under the stewardship of the not-for-profit International DOI Foundation (IDF), adds the important element of collective commitment and management, based on straightforward business interests. DOIs are allocated and managed through Registration Agencies (RAs).

DOI has become somewhat synonymous with scholarly publishing, with most people working in the JISC IE having encountered them in citations for papers in online journals and repositories. However, while publishers continue to play an important role in minting and using DOIs, the use of DOIs to persistently identify datasets produced in research is growing in significance. Last year saw the creation of a new RA - DataCite, which deals with this relatively new and growing area.

There has been much debate over the years about the persistent identification of resources - especially at the technical level. Yet all technical solutions are bound, eventually, to come up against the issue of the persistence, or lack thereof, of organisations of people. In the JISC IE space we can see that publishers come and go, and that journal titles, for example, merge or change ownership from time to time. Universities, seen by many as very persistent organisations (a pre-conception which might, sadly, be tested in the next few years) do, nonetheless, merge and change.

The creation of a body which has as its primary goal the management of the persistence of identifiers - essentially the role of the Registration Agency in DOI - is an approach to addressing this lack of permanence. Within the 'ecosystem' of the RAs, each participant has a vested interest not only in maintaing their own identifiers, but in ensuring that the system as a whole continues to function well. From this point of view, it is in the interests of all participants that the commitment from others is strong which means that the addition of new RAs, such as DataCite, can only be a good thing.

Over the last year or so, IDF has been working with MovieLabs as part of a project to establish the not-for-profit Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR). This initiative includes the establishment of a new Registration Agency for DOIs for all digital resources created for TV and film by a consortium of many of the major producers in the entertainment industry. EIDR is actively seeking more participants, and offers a variety of types of membership.

While the engagement of this new industry may not be directly relevant to many people working in the scope of the JISC IE, the confidence and investment which this industry has placed in the DOI system is significant. This development increases the viability of DOI in general and, as such, should make it a more attractive prospect to those working in the JISC IE and in HE in the UK generally.

Essentially, confidence is an important aspect of persistence - and significant buy-in to DOI from such different sectors, commercial and public, should increase confidence in this solution.

A whitepaper about EIDR is available on request.

An introduction to DOI in a higher education context (set of presentation slides)

datacite: relevant content on this site

ORCID Outreach Event at CERN

Confidence, and the business of persistent identification