Page perso Thierry Adam

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID project is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to provide “a registry of persistent unique identifiers for researchers and scholars and automated linkages to research objects such as publications, grants, and patents“.

It’s a fairly new venture but has been in incubation for some time. Over the last few years there has been lots of interest in having a shared open identifier for helping link together research literature and ORCID is one of the key projects that has crystallised out of those activities. It’s in the process of moving towards a production system. So, whereas MusicBrainz predates the legislation.gov.uk work, the ORCID system is not yet fully launched.

Lets look at its model:

Assets: the primary asset is the database of researcher and contributor identifiers; the project software will also all be open source

Contributors: anyone will be able to use the website tools to create and manage their contributor identifier; there will also be ways for the project members to contribute directly to maintaining the data, e.g. to add new publication links. As noted in the principles, contributors will own their own data and profiles.

Consumers: broadly anyone can participate, but the expectation is that it will be of most value to individual researchers, publishers, and funding agencies

Financial Model: the ability to contribute data and use some of the basic data maintenance tools will be free. However additional services will only be available to paying members. This includes getting more timely access to updated data; notifications of data changes; etc. The project has been bootstrapped with support of a number of initial sponsors.

Licensing: the core database will be released on an annual basis under a CC0 license, placing it into the public domain.

Incentives: the broad incentive for all participants is to help bind together the research literature in a better way than is currently possible. Linking research to authors requires participants from across the whole publishing community, including the authors themselves. Using an open collaboration model ensures that the everyone can engage with a minimum of cost. The publishers, who perhaps stand to gain most, will be bringing sustainability. The membership model has already proven to work in publishing with CrossRef which is similarly structured.

ORCID is an interesting variation when contrasted with the legislation.gov.uk approach. Many aspects are similar: it is industry focused and is solving a known problem. The major financial contributions will come from commercial organisations.

There are also several differences. Firstly the collaboration model is different; its not just commercial organisations that can contribute to the basic maintenance of the data: researchers can manage their own profiles.

Secondly, the data licensing model is different. While legislation.gov.uk offers data under the OGL with free APIs, ORCID places data into the public domain but only plans to update data dumps annually. More frequent access to data requires use of the APIs which is are member services. This difference is clearly useful as a lever to encourage commercial organisations to sign-up, this will directly contribute to the sustainability of the overall project.

via Lost Boy.