The Association of Lithuanian Serials, an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) participant, hosted a conference on unique author identifiers on February 14, 2012, in Vilnius, Lithuania. The conference took place in the Lithuanian parliament (seimas). Three members of ORCID working groups presented at the conference, and their presentation files are now available at http://about.orcid.org/presentations.
Mike Taylor from Elsevier gave an introduction of why unique identifiers for researchers are important, and why using names or disambiguation algorithms only works most of the time. Particularly striking was his own example of him getting mixed up with another Mike Taylor. Taylor also stressed in his presentation that ORCID will enable ‘not just one big thing’, but rather many interesting uses, some of which we might not even know today. His presentation is available at http://about.orcid.org/content/creating-scholarly-universe-importance-asserting-researcher’s-identity.
Gudmundur Thorisson from Leicester University/University of Iceland spoke about contributor identification as a core challenge in data publication. He pointed out that ORCID would facilitate data citation, and this in turn would increase data sharing. Similar to Taylor, he also stressed that ORCID identifiers were intended not only for claiming publications and datasets, but for all relevant scholarly contributions. His presentation is available at http://about.orcid.org/content/contributor-identification-core-challenge-data-publication.
A presentation from Martin Fenner from Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany gave an overview of how ORCID tries to solve the problem of author name ambiguity, with a focus on what the first version of the ORCID software (phase I) will do and will not be able to do. He also gave a status update of ORCID, e.g. that ORCID has released two APIs (including a mock API server), is working hard to finish the phase I software, will soon hire the first permanent staff, and expects to launch the ORCID service in the summer. The presentation is available at http://about.orcid.org/content/orcid-unique-identifiers-authors-and-contributors.
The three other presenters at the conference where Thomas Krichel (Open Access to Scholarly Metadata: Author Claiming and Institutional Identification), Janifer Gatenby (ISNI – International Standard Name Identifier for Creators and Organisations) and Eleonora Dagienė (The Survey on Data Gathering on Researcher Activities: Initial Findings). Dagienė showed preliminary results of a survey conducted with up until now more than 3,000 researchers about their attitudes towards collecting academic outputs. Most survey respondents had not yet heard of ORCID, and there were notable differences in what information researchers found important (e.g. listing their presentations) and what their institutions requested (e.g. patents).
To access our daily STM news feed through your iPhone, iPad, or other smartphones, please visit www.myscoope.com for a mobile friendly reading experience.
