Status update on the ORCID initiative

[Martin Fenner]

One important purpose of this Google Group is to provide information
about the progress of the ORCID initiative. The next ORCID Participant
meeting is November 18 in London, and this is of course a very good
opportunity for both a status update, and a discussion of relevant
topics. In this message I want to give a short summary for those group
members that are either not participants, or can't attend the meeting
in person or virtually.

ORCID was incorporated as a non-profit organization in August, and the
new Board of Directors first met in September. The Board has 14
members (I am one of them), and they are listed on the ORCID website
(http://orcid.org/board-directors). Board members represent an
organization, and there is good representation by the different
stakeholders interested in author name disambiguation. The Business
Working Group and Technical Working Group continue to work as before
the incorporation, but now obviously report to the Board.

The ORCID prototype system is based on Researcher ID code provided by
Thomson Reuters. The system has been enhanced by features required by
ORCID (e.g. integration with other unique author identifier systems).
ORCID participants can access the prototype to develop ORCID
functionality for their own systems (journal submission systems,
bibliographic databases, society membership databases, etc.). Now that
ORCID is incorporated as non-proft organization, the Researcher ID
code can be licensed to ORCID.

The ORCID initiative now has more than 140 participants (listed at
http://orcid.org/directory), and they obviously often have different
opinions about how ORCID should look like. The recently closed ORCID
survey should help sort out the areas of agreement, but also areas
where more discussions are necessary. One important question is how
much or how little bibliographic information the ORCID system should
store in addition to the biographic information associated with the
identifier. Closely related to this is the ongoing discussion about
the business model that supports building and maintaining the ORCID
system.

We currently expect to have a public ORCID beta system available by
next summer.

Feel free to ask any questions about the current status of the ORCID
initiative.