a chat about orcid

with mike

👋

what is orcid?

what orcid is

ORCID stands for "open researcher and contributor id"

 

ORCID is also the name of the not-for-profit organization that provides ORCID IDs, maintains the service, and develops the website and API
 

if you're the kind of person who is bothered when people say "pin number", you'll hate orcid. no one says "ORC IDs".

what is an orcid?

we typically call them "orcid ids"

what an orcid id is

orcid ids are "persistent identifiers" (pids)

what is a persistent identifier (pid)?

what a pid is

pids are unique, persistent (not to be confused with "permanent"), ids assigned to an object, in this case, a person
 

other types of pids include

  • dois (for publications or general works)
  • ror (research organization registry)
     

they solve the problem of disambiguation and allow for far easier tracking of research and researchers

for example

i might write my own name as:

  • Mike Nason
  • Michael Nason
  • Michael Thomas William Nason
  • M. Nason
  • mnason
  • ahemnason
     

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5527-8489

for example

we write UNB as:

  • UNB
  • University of New Brunswick
  • UNBF / UNBSJ
  • UNB Fredericton
  • University of New Brunswick Saint John
     

https://ror.org/05nkf0n29

what a pid is

pids are tied to metadata, and registered with the parent organization that provided the pid

 

for example, when a doi is "minted", publication metadata attached to that doi is registered with crossref or datacite.

 

this metadata includes the location of the work, and if you have a doi you should always be able to access the work (provided that registered metadata is up-to-date)

for example

10.31468/dwr.879

 

dois aren't just links, they also contain heaps of registered metadata

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<doi_batch xmlns="http://www.crossref.org/schema/4.3.6" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:jats="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/JATS1" xmlns:ai="http://www.crossref.org/AccessIndicators.xsd" version="4.3.6" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.crossref.org/schema/4.3.6 https://www.crossref.org/schemas/crossref4.3.6.xsd">
  <head>
    <doi_batch_id>_1634821609</doi_batch_id>
    <timestamp>1634821609</timestamp>
    <depositor>
      <depositor_name>Joel Heng Harste</depositor_name>
      <email_address>jhenghar@sfu.ca</email_address>
    </depositor>
    <registrant>CASDW/ACR</registrant>
  </head>
  <body>
    <journal>
      <journal_metadata>
        <full_title>Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie</full_title>
        <abbrev_title>DW/R</abbrev_title>
        <issn media_type="electronic">2563-7320</issn>
      </journal_metadata>
      <journal_issue>
        <publication_date media_type="online">
          <month>02</month>
          <day>18</day>
          <year>2021</year>
        </publication_date>
        <journal_volume>
          <volume>31</volume>
        </journal_volume>
      </journal_issue>
      <journal_article xmlns:jats="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/JATS1" xmlns:ai="http://www.crossref.org/AccessIndicators.xsd" publication_type="full_text" metadata_distribution_opts="any">
        <titles>
          <title>A Genre Analysis of Social Change: Uptake of the Housing-First Solution to Homelessness in Canada. Diana Wegner. Inkshed, 2020.</title>
        </titles>
        <contributors>
          <person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="first" language="en">
            <given_name>Laila</given_name>
            <surname>Ferreira</surname>
            <ORCID>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5197-9835</ORCID>
          </person_name>
        </contributors>
        <jats:abstract xmlns:jats="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/JATS1">
          <jats:p>This is a book review so there is no abstract.</jats:p>
        </jats:abstract>
        <publication_date media_type="online">
          <month>06</month>
          <day>03</day>
          <year>2021</year>
        </publication_date>
        <pages>
          <first_page>75</first_page>
          <last_page>78</last_page>
        </pages>
        <ai:program xmlns:ai="http://www.crossref.org/AccessIndicators.xsd" name="AccessIndicators">
          <ai:license_ref>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0</ai:license_ref>
        </ai:program>
        <doi_data>
          <doi>10.31468/dwr.879</doi>
          <resource>https://journals.sfu.ca/dwr/index.php/dwr/article/view/879</resource>
          <collection property="crawler-based">
            <item crawler="iParadigms">
              <resource>https://journals.sfu.ca/dwr/index.php/dwr/article/download/879/775</resource>
            </item>
          </collection>
          <collection property="text-mining">
            <item>
              <resource mime_type="application/pdf">https://journals.sfu.ca/dwr/index.php/dwr/article/download/879/775</resource>
            </item>
          </collection>
        </doi_data>
      </journal_article>
    </journal>
  </body>
</doi_batch>

what an orcid is

first and foremost, orcid ids help consistently and properly identify the authors of works no matter what their name is, was, or will be

nearly every publisher can take an orcid id as metadata associated with a publication

 

this metadata can save people time

orcid also provides users with what's known as an orcid profile

 

when you hear someone talk about a scholar profile or a researcher profile, they are probably talking about orcid, scopus id, researcher id, or google scholar (but they might be talking about something else entirely)

 

i've done a handful of talks on this, links for them are on the next slide

ORCID-CA/US October 2021 Community Call: ORCID & Researcher Profiles
video | deck

 

UNB Libraries Research Booster 1
video | deck

 

(bonus) CRKN PIDs Series: Object Identifiers: Use Cases for Librarians and Data Professionals

video | deck

what is an orcid profile?

what an orcid profile is

an orcid profile is basically an online, academic cv

 

users can fill out their information for:

  • employment
  • education/qualifications
  • invited positions/distinctions
  • membership/service
  • funding
  • works

 

they can control what is public or private

what an orcid profile is

orcid profiles are free for anyone to get

 

you don't need to be affiliated with an institution

 

they are ideal for scholars who move between institutions because they have full control over what is in the profile, and who can access it.

what an orcid profile is

sharing your orcid id will allow someone to see everything you've set to public

 

when you publish with an orcid id, it will be displayed along with your name and affiliation so anyone interested can view your public profile

what an orcid profile is

also because your orcid id is stored as metadata within a doi, crossref or datacite can push publication metadata to your orcid profile when you publish

 

within your profile settings, you can set datacite and crossref as trusted parties. this way, so long as you publish somewhere that uses dois, you will not have to manually enter your publications into your profile

what an orcid profile is

you can also share metadata and publications between scopus id/researcher id and orcid.

 

you can use your orcid id to populate them, or vice versa

 

within your profile settings, you can set scopus id/researcher id as trusted parties.

what an orcid profile is

it is possible to share your publication record using your orcid profile instead of submitting a long list of citations

 

this is increasingly common, and required by a number of funders worldwide

none of those funders are canadian

this sounds pretty good

it is

this is the basic sales pitch to researchers, i think

 

a not-for-profit profile service that serves as a portable academic cv that allows for some automation of metadata entry

 

and

 

is increasingly used for grant applications or other administrative time savings

it is easy to recommend and easy to use

 

signing up is astoundingly simple

 

metadata entry and correction, as always, takes a non-trivial amount of time

 

scholars have control, and can dictate access to/from trusted parties

what is a trusted party?

who has access to what?

what a trusted party is

to talk about this, we need to talk about APIs

 

an API (application programming interface) is, basically, a set of rules for interacting with software

 

think of it as being a little like a translator working as an intermediary between two people who don't speak the same language

what a trusted party is

almost all scholarly open infrastructure is based around apis

 

the crossref api, for example, is open. if you know how to query the crossref api and pull metadata from it, you can use dois to do things like populate your institutional repository or compare references metadata to determine citation counts

 

another example is unsub. unsub uses open infrastructure to tell us where we can find our institution in publication metadata.

what a trusted party is

orcid has two apis

 

it has a public api, which is open. you can write software that pulls metadata from the public api. but it only exposes public metadata from a profile.

 

it also has a member api, which is closed and restricted to organizations who are orcid members. (we are an orcid member)

what a trusted party is

a trusted party is an organization who has been authorized by orcid to:

 

  • read private metadata as well as public
  • write metadata to a profile on the researcher's behalf

 

but, the researcher has to individually allow a trusted party. the researcher has full control over external access via the member api. the process requires consent.

what a trusted party is

these trusted party interactions; where an organization can leverage the member api for publishing metadata and private details (assuming the researcher says "yes"), are very often referred to as integrations

 

being an orcid member entitles you to 5 api keys, each for use with an integration

what an integration does

an orcid membership by itself does not provide really any tools for pulling or reading swaths of metadata

 

to use the API, you need software that has an integration. for a research office this would be, like, elsevier pur, or clarivate's converis, or the open source platform VIVO, or dSpace CRIS.

 

these platforms are authorized to read/write to the member API

do we have one of those?

no

 

in fact, the platform seemingly chosen by ORS has expressed disinterest in being authorized by orcid

 

we have 5 member API keys

 

the only software on campus that can use one is open journal systems

what about ccv?

ccv has no integrations with anyone. it doesn't have an api at all, and is not actively developed.

 

it is possible to get publication metadata from orcid to ccv. i wrote a guide for that.

 

ccv ingests bibtex, which you might recall was the prominent citation schema of endnote. it's also the way metadata is stored in orcid.

what about ccv?

tri-agency representatives are on the canadian persistent identifier strategy committee, cpidac (Jamie is on that committee)

 

as chair of the orcid-ca governing committee, i know that the tri-agency is looking into the successor for ccv.

 

we can assume it will support orcid ingest, but we absolutely do not know that for sure

what does all this mean for unb?

well, orcid is useful for:

  • personally tracking publication history and name disambiguation for our scholars
  • submitting citation information to member organizations that are trusted parties (funding bodies in the US or the UK in particular)
  • a portable cv that some schools in Canada can use instead of a word document for assessment/annual review (those with a significant investment in their CRIS systems)
  • tracking information that scopus- and researcher-id do not track (they are journal-specific)

orcid is useful for:

being a modern researcher interested in saving themselves some drudgery

 

it is best described as an investment. it will take time and effort to fully set one up, but ideally, in the not-too-distant future, its ubiquity will extend to Canadian researchers

orcid is not currently useful for:

automating metadata entry at the institutional level without a platform with an authorized integration

 

populating your ccv (unless you don't mind hand-editing bibtex)

 

pulling metadata faculty do not want you to pull (especially without using the member API)

the bottom line

right now, orcid does not solve any major headaches for our research community

 

or rather, it could, if our government or institution were able to leverage it

 

in places with funder-mandated orcid requirements, uptake is high and there is suitable motivation to adopt (and very little downside)

the bottom line

for our researchers, interest will vary from discipline-to-discipline, career-to-career

 

some are very on-board and into it. some could care less. some [union members] are concerned that it's a little like being barcoded so that a platform can round everyone's worth down to an easily comparable number.

the bottom line

ultimately, each researcher would have to decide whether or not to make UNB a trusted party, were that even possible (and right now, it isn't)

 

some people won't be motivated at all here, and that's probably fine

one more thing...

so, what's ors doing?

stop being obtuse, please

it seems as though

ors has chosen to use a platform called uniweb

 

uniweb is made by a small Canadian shop called proximify

 

proximify don't work in academic publishing and they are not an open-source shop

 

uniweb says it supports orcid, but it only scrapes public data off of orcid profiles and then uses dois to pull metadata from crossref

it seems as though

uniweb does not support the member api

 

uniweb cannot accurately scrape data that doesn't have a doi or requires a trusted party

 

uniweb has expressed, additionally, that it is not interested in becoming a trusted party

 

ors will have no use for our member api keys

it seems as though

uniweb does claim to push content to ccv

 

how they do this is kind of a mystery to me, but i suspect it's also just manipulated bibtex (it's the only thing ccv seems to ingest)

 

they don't have some special process that enormous, international orgs do not have

 

but, for orcid to work with uniweb locally (so that it could push to ccv) a researcher would have to enter some data both in orcid and uniweb

that doesn't seem great

it isn't

a major hurdle in this space is pulling/recording publication metadata. publisher metadata is often not perfect.

 

correcting and supplementing metadata is a tremendous, time-intensive undertaking.

uniweb/proximify may, with enough client pressure, be willing to adjust their position on a service that every school in canada assumes they are getting out of the box.

 

as it stands, they are profiting substantially off of the suggestion that they are a partner in open scholarly infrastructure. however, they are currently only taking from that infrastructure.