Welcome to the ORCID Researchers Group

[Martin Fenner]

Welcome everybody. The purpose of this group is to allow researchers
to talk about the Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative.
We will try to inform you about new developments, and listen to your
feedback and concerns. This group is also a good starting point for
research projects that want to integrate ORCID functionality.

This group will focus on researchers and will not duplicate other
efforts, including the ORCID Website (http://www.orcid.org), Facebook
page (http://www.facebook.com/orcid.org) and Twitter account (http://
www.twitter.com/orcid_org).

Martin Fenner (Hannover Medical School and ORCID Board Member).

[pitman]

Many thanks Martin for setting up the group. Here is some feedback and
an expression of concern. This is
my response to the final question of the ORCID participant survey a
few weeks ago "Are any further comments you would like to give?":

Several of the questions asked me to respond as a member of a
community. I belong to many communities: department, university,
probability/statistics/mathematics/biblio_data subject communities.
Some of my answers would be different according to community, and
other considerations. e.g.
The question of whether any of these communities is willing to pay for
ORCID service? Not if
it is a closed membership community with closed data. Possibly if its
open data, open API. Publishers already impose a huge tax on the
academic community. They could easily support a modest form of ORCID,
and then license higher quality info services back to the academic
community as a result. So why should the academic community pay
directly for something publishers already see some benefit in?
If its a closed membership club like Xref, count on me and others in
the open biblio community
http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/bibliography
to create and maintain a competing and I expect ultimately more
successful distributed system
for purposes of academic research, based on open data principles.

On the question of what data I think ORCID should keep. As long as it
is open, then as much a
s possible, subject only to privacy and copyright laws and data
quality considerations. If ORCID is a closed system, largely
controlled by publishers, it should be allowed to acquire as little
data as possible to serve the function of author identification.
Authors would then be well advised to shun making contributions to
the ORCID system, and instead maintain their bibliographies on
whatever alternative system could be developed with open data
standards. This can easily be done on university controlled web
servers, using e.g. Open Scholar software http://openscholar.harvard.edu/home
to locally
manage the data, OAI-PMH harvesting to provide aggregated views, and
Google to take care of search.

This is a critical phenomenon. If ORCID is made too closed, it will
fail to achieve much, and be a lose/lose for publishers and the
academic community. If it is created according to open data
principles, it has the potential to be a win/win

------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970 fax: 510-642-7892
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman

[Martin Fenner]

Jim,

thank you very much for your detailed feedback and your expression of
concern. In a way the ORCID initiative is trying something impossible.
ORCID is based on the assumption that a single unique researcher
identifier would be preferable to the current situation of many
separate identifiers limited to a specific discipline, institution or
country. As there is probably no single trusted institution that could
provide this unique researcher identifier, the only solution is a
large initiative involving as many stakeholders as possible. ORCID is
doing exactly that, and it is inevitable that all these stakeholders
have very different views on how such as system will look like. The
purpose of the ORCID Participant Survey was to help understand these
different views to identify areas of agreement and disagreement. We
then will have the very difficult task to find a solution that is
acceptable to all or most participants.

As a researcher I can agree with almost everything you say. I also see
the importance of Open Data, and believe that it is a critical
component of any unique researcher identifier system. One important
purpose of this Google Group is to solicit input from the researcher
community. It would certainly be helpful to argue for Open Data in
ORCID if there are not only many surveys responses in that direction,
but there is also consensus in this group (which is arguably still
very small at this point). I agree that there is the big danger that a
system that is too closed will be shunned my many researchers and will
ultimately fail.

I disagree with the notion that only publishers should pay for a
unique researcher identifier system, as I think that researchers,
universities, funders and others that benefit from such a system
should also contribute in some way. For me the biggest challenge for
the ORCID initiative in the coming months will be to design a system
that is as open as possible, but at the same time is financially self-
supported and with enough resources to make significant progress in
the next 18-36 months. My biggest hope is of course financial support
from funders, but most of them have not yet gotten involved with
ORCID. I also hope that we can find ways that make building and
running the service as cost-effective as possible, e.g. by using open
source software and a distributed development model.

Kind regards,

Martin

On 3 Nov., 19:36, pitman <jimpitma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Many thanks Martin for setting up the group. Here is some feedback and
> an expression of concern. This is
> my response to the final question of the ORCID participant survey a
> few weeks ago "Are any further comments you would like to give?":
>
> Several of the questions asked me to respond as a member of a
> community. I belong to many communities: department, university,
> probability/statistics/mathematics/biblio_data subject communities.
> Some of my answers would be different according to community, and
> other considerations. e.g.
> The question of whether any of these communities is willing to pay for
> ORCID service? Not if
> it is a closed membership community with closed data. Possibly if its
> open data, open API. Publishers already impose  a huge tax on the
> academic community. They could easily support a modest form of ORCID,
> and then license higher quality info services back to the academic
> community as a result. So why should the academic community pay
> directly for something publishers already see some benefit in?
>  If its a closed membership club like Xref, count on me and others in

> the open biblio communityhttp://wiki.okfn.org/wg/bibliography

> to create and maintain a competing and I expect ultimately more
> successful distributed system
>  for purposes of academic research, based on open data principles.
>
> On the question of what data I think ORCID should keep. As long as it
> is open, then as much a
> s possible, subject only to privacy and copyright laws and data
> quality considerations. If ORCID is a closed system, largely
> controlled by publishers, it should be allowed to acquire as little
> data as possible to serve the function of author identification.
> Authors would then be  well advised to shun making contributions to
> the ORCID system, and instead maintain their bibliographies on
> whatever alternative system could be developed with open data
> standards. This can easily be done on university controlled web

> servers, using e.g.  Open Scholar softwarehttp://openscholar.harvard.edu/home

> to locally
> manage the data, OAI-PMH harvesting to provide aggregated views, and
> Google to take care of search.
>
> This is a critical phenomenon. If ORCID is made too closed, it will
> fail to achieve much, and be a lose/lose for publishers and the
> academic community. If it is created according to open data
> principles, it has the potential to be a win/win
>
> ------------------------------------
> Jim Pitman

> Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Projecthttp://www.bibkn.org/

[Cameron Neylon]

Jim

Just to echo what Martin said. I think the key thing is that we collect
these messages on behalf of both the research community (communities) in
general and specifically that community that would be interested in playing
with these tools.

I don't speak on behalf of ORCID and am absolutely with you that unless
there is open access to the identifiers through a linked data compliant
protocol that at best ORCID will become a single sign on for traditional
publishers. My personal belief is that ORCID can be financially viable by
providing an open underlying framework and then providing paid for services
to larger partners that can use them. Indeed I believe that any different
path is likely to lead to failure. I don't know what the results of the
survey were but I hear an awful lot of dismayed noises at some of the
questions.

I think if we can make a strong representation that for these to be useful
to researchers themselves (and therefore actually adopted and used - owned
and curated by the researchers) the framework needs to be as open and
accessible as possible and free at point of use then that will be the most
useful thing this group can do. I accept that there needs to be a business
model but I hope that business enables organic growth. But we need to make
that case effectively.

Cheers

Cameron

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