[open-bibliography] ORCID SURVEY

[Jim Pitman]

ORCID, Inc. is a recently constituted non-profit organization dedicated to solving the name
ambiguity problem in scholarly research. See http://www.orcid.org/board-directors
for its board of directors and a link to the press release about its formation.

ORCID has recently polled its participants with a survey intended to gather stakeholder views on its development.
Halina Suwalowska of the Wellcome Trust <h.suwalowska at wellcome.ac.uk> is overseeing the survey, 
and encouraged me to forward to this list an invitation to participate.

I think it important for ORCID directors to hear from as many open-biblio supporters as
possible, to balance the views of those who may favor a more closed system of greater benefit to
commercial partners.
If you are willing to fill out the survey, (it only takes about 10 minutes) please email Halina to obtain a copy.
Note the deadline is just a few days away: Thursday October 14.
Let me also encourage you to register with ORCID some organization you are associated with, for similar reasons.  

I append FYI my response to the final question appealing for further comments.
I point out some issues with the survey, the existence of this group, and what I expect might
be the collective attitude of this group on these issues. 
If you wish to comment on this assessement, please do so with cc to Halina.

many thanks

--Jim Pitman
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FINAL QUESTION ON THE ORCID SURVEY:

Are any further comments you would like to give?
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Response by Jim Pitman:

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 as 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

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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
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman