[Open-access] ORCiD and Libraries

Mon Jul 6 14:28:58 UTC 2015

I sympathise with the sentiment behind Thomas’s remark:

“It's puzzling to me why any open access advocate would promote it.”

I share his concern that in the longer term the research community may come to regret its dependence on this system. But in the end it’s all about compromise. ORCID has momentum - it is quite likely to help accelerate the integration of systems and datasets in the short-medium term, and this is important too.

I have a little optimism that ORCID may pave the way for a better system, by finally demonstrating the value of global identifiers for authors to the mainstream research community.

Paul

> On 6 Jul 2015, at 15:08, Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>  Vignoli Michela writes
> 
>> Are there good alternatives to ORCID?
> 
>  The issue of author identification is very complicated. ORCID tries
>  to attack all facets at the same time. This implies constructing a
>  complicated, expensive, proprietary, and monopolistic
>  system. Ultimately it will help to further cement the stranglehold
>  of the publishing industry over scholarly communication. It's
>  puzzling to me why any open access advocate would promote it.
> 
>  As I pointed in an earlier mail here, I worked on author
>  claiming. This is one aspect of author identification, albeit an
>  important one. An open system would allow for institutions to
>  collaborate on author identification, having that problem taken care
>  of.
> 
>  In the late 2000s I built an interdisciplinary version of the RePEc
>  Author Service, called AuthorClaim. I started on this before
>  ORCiD. The main problem in building AuthorClaim is open access to
>  bibliographic data. There are some reusable datasets but overall
>  coverage is sketchy. The massive occurrence of certain names is less
>  af a problem than one may think because it is possible to throw
>  machine learning algorithms at the problem even at the time
>  registrants wade through a bunch of proposed documents.
> 
>  Needless to say I don't have the propaganda resources of the
>  publishing industry. AuthorClaim is working, it is open access but
>  largely unused. I have not done active development on it in the most
>  recent years but I would welcome collaborators who could take it
>  over.
> 
>  Don't hesitate to contact my off-list about this.
> 
>> And is there a paper or something highlighting the pros and cons for
>> using the one or the other?
> 
>  The best theoretical summary of the issue I have seen was
>  a talk by Geoff Bilder at this meeting
> 
> https://conceptweblog.wordpress.com/conferences/
> 
>  I had the great fortune to be in the audience. The link to the
>  podcast is broken. Maybe you can contact NYIT to ask where it went.
> 
> --
> 
>  Cheers,
> 
>  Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                                              skype:thomaskrichel
> 
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Paul Walk
http://www.paulwalk.net
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