orcid-ca/us community call

what I talk about when I talk about researcher profiles and platforms

mike nason // open scholarship & publishing librarian, unb libraries
                    // crossref & metadata liaison, public knowledge project

inside baseball:
    a disclaimer

managing

expectations

researchers are under an enormous amount of pressure

researchers are very tired and/or busy people

some researchers are also, rightly, worried about being boiled down into simple, reductive numbers and compared to one another

if folks are taking the time to hear you out about scholar profiles at all that is a kind of victory

and, please remember that adopting or migrating to a new platform will require labour

you only need to hit the boat

platforms

the usual suspects

• orcid
• scopus id (elsevier)
• researcher id (tr)
• google scholar

• academia.edu
• researchgate
• linkedin
• personal web pages

• pre-print servers
• repositories
• cris systems

• discord
• slack
• twitter
• facebook

research profile

social media

communities of practice

vs

vs

social media

social media

also social media

social media

• venture capital-funded
• for-profit
• sells data, or...
• sells ads, or...
• sells partnerships
• not yours
• ephemeral

the objective of social media platforms is to make money

• researchgate
  • $87.6M in funding
  • lead investor:
    goldman sachs
• academia.edu
  • $38.8M in funding
  • lead investor:
    tencent

social media

• benefits
  • specifically made to facilitate connections
  • as ubiquitous as they are easy to use
• drawbacks
  • if you think facebook is gross, so are these
• context
  • vc-funding means these companies are dedicated to a return on investment
  • investors may have an outsized influence

communities of practice

communities of practice

communities of practice

communities of practice

communities of practice

• benefits
  • more eyes on research
  • keeping up with new developments
  • limited and intentional
• drawbacks
  • platform dependent
• context
  • platform dependent

research profiles

research profiles

google scholar

• ubiquitous
• effective
• outsized influence
• undersized staff
• could be gone tomorrow

scopus id

• elsevier-owned
• can integrate with ORCID
• too big to fail
• inevitable metadata headaches
• cannot capture everything
• limited to elsevier's
• don't publishers have enough?

researcher id

• clarivate-owned
• can integrate with ORCID
• too big to fail
• inevitable metadata headaches
• cannot capture everything
• don't publishers/metrics companies have enough?

orcid

• not-for-profit
• scholarly open infrastructure
• great for identity reasons
• leveraged by the other big two & most publishers
• a little like being barcoded
• membership benefits often misrepresented

context is important

a few useful narratives

early-career researchers

mid-to-late career researchers

administrators

the bottom line

orcid is easy to recommend

other choices are contextual

telling people they are doing it wrong isn't useful

it is important to stress researcher agency

you are doing a great job

thanks, questions?