Finally a good initiative: ORCID: Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative

ORCID: Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative – Home.

Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems imbedded in the scholarly research ecosystem. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard. Our mission is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration. Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organizations, from governments to universities.

And related news “knowledge speak:

http://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpBatch=1321&pickUpID=9303

Research community members seek to resolve author name ambiguity issue – 07 Dec 2009

Various members of the research community have announced their intent to collaborate to resolve the existing author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication. Together, the group hopes to develop an open, independent identification system for scholarly authors. This follows the first Name Identifier Summit held last month in Cambridge, MA, by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity. A follow-on meeting of this group took place in London last week to discuss the next steps.

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is seen as key for the transition from science to e-science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organisations, from governments to universities.

The organisations that have agreed to work together to overcome the contributor identification issue include: American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Association for Computing Machinery, British Library, CrossRef, Elsevier, European Molecular Biology Organisation, Hindawi, INSPIRE (project of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, SLAC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Nature Publishing Group, Public Library of Science, ProQuest, SAGE Publications Inc., Springer, Thomson Reuters, University College London, University of Manchester (JISC Names Project), University of Vienna, Wellcome Trust and Wiley-Blackwell.

The variety in Researcher information services

I crossed a nice list of Researcher information services @ the REPINF wiki this week:

Research Crossroads

http://www.researchcrossroads.org

Self-registering searchable service that collects data on researchers in science and medicine: their research, grant funding, publications, affiliation, biography, etc. Also provides searchable databases on funders, grants awarded and clinical trials. Also acts as a networking tool.

Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu

Authors self-register themselves, their departments and universities/institutions. Authors add details of their papers. Currently has around 24K people and 87K papers.

ResearcherID

http://www.researcherid.com/

Thomson Reuters’ author profiling service. Searchable researcher/research database with the benefit of Thomson Reuters’ unique author identifier system (see Author Identifiers topic).

ResearchGate

https://www.researchgate.net/

Scientists’ network with over 180,000 members to date (November 2009). Scientists add details about themselves and their work, upload full-texts of their papers, and discuss relevant topics. Has just introduced a ‘micro-article’ idea, which is to encourage scientists to write and upload brief versions of their latest work for rapid communication and discussion. There is also an embryonic job advertising facility. Free to join and use. It is not clear how this initiative is supported fiancially, though it claims to be bulit ‘by scientists for scientists’.

bibapp

http://bibapp.org/

For use as an institutional ‘campus gateway’. Database of researchers, their publications and their institutional affiliations (group/department/school, etc), enabling a search for ‘campus experts’. Accepts deposits in popular formats (e.g. Refworks) and provides automatic rights-checking using SHERPA RoMEO. Makes SWORD-compliant deposits to the institutional repository or other locations.

VIVO

http://vivo.cornell.edu/

Developed at Cornell University Library. A campus research discovery tool. Researchers can manage their own page/profile, which usually links to their personal web page and departmental or other affiliation web pages.

Scholar Universe (ProQuest)

http://www.scholaruniverse.com/productinfo.jsp

2 million scholar profiles generated from ProQuest’s databases.

Selected Works (Berkeley Electronic Press)

http://works.bepress.com/

Authors create their own profiles for a campus profiling service.