Category: Unique identifiers

The U.S. ORCID Consortium is five!

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the formation of the U.S. ORCID Community through Lyrasis, Scholarly Kitchen interviewed Sheila Rabun, the original ORCID U.S. Community Specialist and now Program Leader for Persistent Identifier Communities for Lyrasis. ORCID plays a key role in enabling researchers to efficiently share their research works throughout the scholarly communication ecosystem. In 2018 the U.S. Community came under the administration of Lyrasis when the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Greater Western Library Alliance and the NorthEast Research Libraries merged with Lyrasis to form a stronger organization to advance the adoption of ORCID and provide a community of practice. The ORCID US Consortium is now one of 26 consortium worldwide. They provide ORCID related webinars, showcases of integrations and best practices, member support and community resources. They also offer a “ORCID Workshop for Researchers.” 

From the perspective of this member library, the community has been a very important resource. Sheila named challenges that we as a university face as well: individual researchers not using their ORCID iD and ORCID record, and lack of ORCID API integration in the many software systems being used in the research ecosystem. The outlook for ORCID adoption and use by individual researchers and U.S. institutions is more promising as the NSPM-33 (National Security Presidential Memorandum 33) and the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy OSTP memo are implemented. Persistent identifiers, including ORCID, are key elements of FAIR research information exchange which benefit scientific communities around the world.

Visit the UMass Amherst Libraries ORCID guide for more information about getting and using an ORCID ID, and contact us with any questions.

CrossRef as source metadata for literature in the arts and humanities

For those seeking citations for literature in the arts and humanities, the most prominent tools have limitations of discipline, language, geographic and/or open availability. The authors of “Crossref as a bibliographic discovery tool in the arts and humanities” investigate CrossRef as a potential source of literature on the arts and humanities. CrossRef has the advantages of being an open source, community-governed, non-profit and globally adopted platform for sharing research objects. Its mission is to make “research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.” The authors examine Dimensions, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus and Web of Science as potential sources of research in the arts and humanities. Google Scholar has the most comprehensive coverage and is free to use, but these researchers dismissed it for lack of widespread use. Web of Science and Scopus are both large and widely used, though their coverage tilts towards English language, STEM research produced in the Global North. Ultimately the authors choose to compare CrossRef with Scopus using the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH Plus) journal title list as the basis for subject comparison because CrossRef does not include subject metadata.

The authors found that CrossRef covered more ERIH Plus journals than Scopus (80% to 49%) and better coverage of journals published in Eastern and Southern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. They note the significance of this in the arts and humanities where research often has a regional or national focus. The disadvantages of CrossRef as a tool come through in the metadata available. The lack of subject metadata is a major drawback for any search that doesn’t begin with a known citation. Reference linking and cited-by tools depend on publishers depositing reference metadata with articles, and the study found that only half the journals have article reference lists. This should improve as CrossRef required publishers to make reference lists open in 2022. The inclusion of abstracts and author information also varied depending on language of the document. The study authors conclude that CrossRef has its strengths in coverage for the arts and humanities, but also has its problems as a discovery tool. They lay the responsibility for this with publishers and encourage further study of publisher motivations and practices for sharing metadata.

Why persistent identifiers (PIDs) matter

In “Why PID Strategies are Having a Moment – and Why You should Care” Alice Meadows addresses the role of PIDs in scholarly communication and why they are getting more attention. Persistent identifiers for researchers (e.g. ORCID), works (DOIs) and organizations (e.g. ROR) form a network to transfer research metadata between researchers, funders, government agencies, publishers and other institutions in open, community-governed and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) protocols. For all parties involved, adopting PIDs translates to higher accuracy and less time. Meadows quotes a couple of recent studies on the administrative time (and money) wasted on rekeying data. PID-based networks are designed to eliminate that waste.

Policy-makers and funders are paying attention to the benefits of PID-based administrative systems and networks, from the Nelson Memo in the U.S. to Plan S in Europe, and requiring their use. Researchers who adopt and use PIDs spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on actual research. The benefits of PIDs will be fully realized when more people, and systems, employ them.

A guide to pre-print publication for early career researchers

Early career researchers (ECRs), including undergraduates and graduate students, postdocs, research associates and staff scientists, usually follow a lead author’s preference for publication channels. A pre-print is a final version of a research paper made publicly available prior to completion of a journal peer review process. A guide to pre-printing for early career researchers lays out why an ECR would want to submit research to a pre-print server and how to go about doing it. The authors note the increased submission rates to pre-print servers in the life sciences, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, through the Covid-19 pandemic as a means to rapidly disseminate new research. Making timely research contributions to pressing issues is one of several advantages to publishing a pre-print:

  • the paper is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), making it a permanent part of the scholarly record and recognizing the researchers for their work;
  • as a pre-print, the paper’s metadata is indexed by and discoverable through major search engines and scholarly databases;
  • a pre-print is free to read, review and cite; and
  • many funders allow and recognize pre-prints in grant applications and reports.

Publishing research on a pre-print server is an antidote to the work getting “scooped,” and broader exposure makes it subject to more timely examination and inclusion than it would get through a single journal peer review process. Still, lead authors and senior researchers may be resistant or afraid of sharing their work outside the journal review process. The guide advises ECRs about how to approach colleagues about pre-print publication, addressing potential points of concern and counterpoints. If all co-authors are in agreement with pre-printing, next steps include determining the server, choosing the license, preparing and submitting the work, and sharing its availability to your networks. This is a practical guide to why and how to share research on pre-print servers.

Cassandra L. Ettinger, Madhumala K. Sadanandappa, Kıvanç Görgülü, Karen L. Coghlan, Kenneth K. Hallenbeck, Iratxe Puebla; A guide to preprinting for early-career researchers. Biol Open 15 July 2022; 11 (7): bio059310. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.059310

ORCID data is FAIR data

ORCID: Keeping Up with FAIR Momentum details how the ORCID registry aligns with and advances the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) for optimizing research output exchange. While most commonly associated with data, the FAIR principles apply more broadly to any digital asset, such as the myriad work types, funding sources, education & qualifications, peer review activity, distinctions, etc. included in an ORCID record; the metadata that describes that asset; and the research infrastructure that enables the collection, storage or exchange of data or metadata.

Each of the FAIR principles has three (accessible, interoperable, reusable) or four (findable) expressions and this post elaborates how ORCID manifests each one of them. From unique and persistent identifiers, to integration with standards and structured protocols, registration and indexing, open licenses and shared governance, ORCID works hand-in-glove with FAIR. Furthermore, ORCID provides critical infrastructure for research and scholarly data exchange, and organizations and individuals who use ORCID are also putting the FAIR principles into practice.

Improving research and expanding open peer review

eLife, a “publish, review, curate” open access, non-profit life sciences and medicine publisher, and PREreview, a collaborative, open peer review platform, are furthering their collaboration to engage more scholars from communities around the world in preprint review. Together they’ve offered peer review training programs for early-career researchers in a joint project with AfricArXiv, Eider Africa and TCC Africa. Their goal is to improve and strengthen research globally by engaging multiple perspectives from traditionally marginalized communities in preprint review. Both eLife and PREreview operate open access and open source platforms, and they are integrating them with each other and with ORCID, so that any researcher with an ORCID ID can request and share reviews to any preprint with a digital object identifier (DOI). These are welcomed efforts to build more robust technical and human partnerships in service of open science.

Open Scholarship Series workshops

Spring 2022

We invite you to register for and attend a virtual workshop (or three!) to advance your proficiency and scholarly connections:

  • Tools for Managing Your Scholarly Identity: Building Your ORCiD Profile – March 3 at 2:00 p.m. and March 16 at noon.
    Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a free, unique, persistent and universal digital identifier. For those who have an ORCiD ID, this workshop provides dedicated time to review and expand your profile with librarian guidance.
    Note #1: ORCID registration is required for doctoral dissertation and masters theses submissions to ScholarWorks.
    Note #2: We encourage you to obtain an ORCiD ID before the workshop. Guidance is available: https://guides.library.umass.edu/ScholarlyPublishing/ORCiD
  • Open Access, peer review and predatory publishing: can you have the first two without the third? – March 7 at noon and April 7 at 2:00 p.m.
    Answer: YES!! Open access refers to who can use scholarly works free of charge and how scholarly publishing is funded, not the scholarship’s quality or rigor. Open access publishing provides citation and impact advantages to authors and barrier-free access to users. However, some open access “publishers” use “author pays” models to reap profits while disregarding ethical publishing practices, peer review and quality. We’ll outline the attributes of high-quality open access publishing and the warning signs of shady publishers. With this information, you can gain the benefits of OA publishing and enhance your scholarly reputation.
  • Sharing and promoting your research: how the Libraries can help – March 9 at 4:00 p.m. and March 28 at noon.
    Do you have a published article that you’d like to share with readers beyond UMass Amherst? What about a working paper or a dataset? Join us to hear about the ways the Libraries can help you expand the reach and impact of your work.

Sustaining open content and infrastructure: views from research libraries

Academic research libraries are among the stakeholders – with scholars, funders, professional societies and public policy experts – with a mission to widely disseminate research and scholarship. Many believe that open content and infrastructure are critical means to unfettered distribution and beneficial impact. The Association of Research Libraries’ recent report, Research Library Issues, no. 302 (2021): Sustaining Open Content and Infrastructure, delves into three aspects of open scholarship ecosystems: open persistent identifiers, digital accessibility planning, and standardized data about open scholarly infrastructure use and funding. If these terms and acronyms sound vaguely familiar, this report will give you context: PIDs, DOI, ORCiD ID, ROR, APIs, DMP, HTML, EPUB, and PDF, WCAG, Accessible EPUB3, PDF U/A, captioning, 2.5% commitment, SCIP, SCOSS, COAR and more! The report gives rationale, history and current standards or initiatives for each of these. It doesn’t break new ground, but it does highlight what the Association of Research Libraries deems in need of urgent attention.

Claim and share your research contributor roles with Rescognito

Rescognito is a new, free and open system with a mission to expand researcher recognition. An individual researcher identity is verified by an ORCID ID and a scholarly work (article/preprint, data set, software, protocol, etc.) must have a digital object identifier (DOI). Based on verification of these two persistent identifiers, a researcher/scholar/contributor may claim up to 5 different roles they fulfilled in the scholarship from the CRediT Taxonomy of 14 potential types (conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, software, validation, etc.). A researcher may also recognize work performed by others. With the researcher’s permission, these contributor roles can be transparently shared to their ORCID profile. Publishers may collaborate with Rescognito to implement the CRediT Taxonomy and data checklists within their publication workflows. As a standards-based (CRediT, DOI, ORCID, ROR), transparent, researcher-driven tool that plugs into the open scholarship ecosystem, Rescognito promulgates the various facets of research and who performs them.

Keeping the researcher at the center of data control and quality: a review of the ORCID Trust Program

ORCID established its Trust Program in 2016, and this blog post celebrates its fifth anniversary. The ORCID organization, of which UMass Amherst is a member, has a mission “of enabling transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations” and “a vision of a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.” These aspirations are made real on the basis of trust built on individual researcher control, accountability and strict organization provenance tracking. Researchers/scholars/contributors control who can write to, read from and edit the data associated with their ORCID profile, for how long they can do it, with verification of the source organizations.

With ORCID’s growth have come attempts to misuse the connections and tools it provides. These include automated search engine optimization and spam generators that could potentially undermine trust. ORCID has put in place brakes that halt these schemes. Another less common problem is academic fraud by which people misrepresent their works and affiliations. This is a violation of the terms of use and these records can be challenged through the dispute procedures. ORCID is not an arbiter of what data is associated with a contributor profile, but it does provide authenticated workflows with registered data providers. A researcher can determine for themselves the authenticity of the data and the provenance of the data provider before deciding whether or not to grant permission for data exchange.

ORCID is a non-profit, member-governed organization that provides an open platform for disambiguated, unique and persistent researcher/scholar/contributor name identifier and profile information. And ORCID ID is a free service to individuals. More information about ORCID is available from this guide.