ORCID Principles

[Martin Fenner]

The ORCID principles have been published at http://orcid.org/principles:

1. 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.
   
2. ORCID will transcend discipline, geographic, national and institutional, boundaries.
3. Participation in ORCID is open to any organization that has an interest in scholarly communications.
4. Access to ORCID services will be based on transparent and non-discriminatory terms posted on the ORCID website.
5. Researchers will be able to create, edit, and maintain an ORCID ID and profile free of charge.
6. Researchers will control the defined privacy settings of their own ORCID profile data.
7. All profile data contributed to ORCID by researchers or claimed by them will be available in standard formats for free download (subject to the researchers' own privacy settings) that is updated once a year and released under the CC0 waiver.
8. All software developed by ORCID will be publicly released under an Open Source Software license approved by the Open Source Initiative. For the software it adopts, ORCID will prefer Open Source.
9. ORCID identifiers and profile data (subject to privacy settings) will be made available via a combination of no charge and for a fee APIs and services. Any fees will be set to ensure the sustainability of ORCID as a not-for-profit, charitable organization focused on the long-term persistence of the ORCID system.
10. ORCID will be governed by representatives from a broad cross-section of stakeholders, the majority of whom are not-for-profit, and will strive for maximal transparency by publicly posting summaries of all board meetings and annual financial reports.

[Angus Whyte]

Re "authors and contributors" and "researchers" does ORCID propose to define and limit these or if not who defines them? It seems relatively easy to define an author, and normal peer review will presumably set de-facto boundaries around who in practice that is. However some author/contributors may be industrial partners and would not see themselves as "researchers" in the academic sense. Others may also be involved through citizen science or participatory research projects.  I'm not certain that ORCID is intended to work for datasets, but if it is then contributors to datasets will often include these 'non-researcher' categories. I'd treat rsearch 'subjects' as a different category but the boundaries can be blurred. Perhaps these are all questions to be addressed under interoperability with other id systems? Apologies if they are addressed somewhere obvious I haven't looked at.

best wishes

Angus Whyte

[Cameron Neylon]

Angus

I agree this is a critical issue and why I was happy to see the word “contributor” adopted for ORCID. I believe the aim is to be as inclusive as possible. I don’t doubt that it will start with academic institutions but will hopefully move beyond that. I very much hope there is a mechanism for non-traditional contributors to be enabled to get an ORCID and to go from there. I think the most likely mechanism for this will be through being included as an author on a paper in the first instance but I would certainly hope we see this expand to contributions to databases and possibly commenting forums and post publication peer review as well.

Cheers

Cameron

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[Martin Fenner]

Angus, you raise a very good point. The intention of ORCID is to look at all contributors to scholarly works. In practical terms the question is really what scholarly works have an identifier so that we can attribute them to a contributor. Having an ORCID really only makes sense if you can connect the person to the work. That is certainly easy for publications (CrossRef DOI) and will be for research datasets (DataCite DOI), but more difficult for other contributions. It would be good to also have a unique identifier system for presentations and posters at conferences, for patents, for teaching, etc. but we are not there yet.

 

Kind regards, Martin

[Angus Whyte]

Martin, Cameron

I suppose a middle way between no-restrictions and no-entry could work. If ORCID relies on the principle that researchers are best placed to own the problem of maintaining a unique id and profile, I guess that needs to be motivated by the notion that id ambiguity may translate to lower counts in citation metrics and broken links in CVs which in turn = possibly missed opportunities for funding and collaboration. That seems plausible for traditional contributors but for non-traditionals there may be more motivation to use other id systems (or none).  I'm curious to know if there are studies gauging to what extent researchers and other stakeholders see identity ambiguity as a problem?

cheers,
Angus

[Martin Fenner]

Angus, I'm not aware of studies that look at the extend to which researchers see identity ambiguity as a problem. This probably depends on many factors, most importantly whether your own name is common or rather unique. One of the more painful exercises that I have to do as a researcher is the institutional bibliography where we have to submit our publications every year. And our institutional webpages list our departmental publications, but the list stops in 2007.

 

Kind regards,

 

Martin