The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) is moving toward a release of its service this year. How can research libraries prepare to help their faculty and grad students to participate in and reap the benefit of a service that proposes to provide persistent unique identifiers for researchers.
The benefits of a good system for name disambiguation related to researcher outputs are numerous and it would seem like libraries, especially those which host institutional repositories, have assets that would be enriched by better tracking of citations, grant outcomes, etc.
What are practical steps that libraries can take now to support researcher IDs and, closely related, data citation?
trevormunoz
Most researchers won't need "help" with ORCID; they either have one already (through Thomson's ResearcherID or whatever) or one of their publishers will assign them one without their knowledge, which is frankly the best way to handle the matter.
I don't see a great deal of reason to make a big fuss about ORCID, honestly. It's just another identifier. If the concern is that their work won't be associated with their ORCID, that's the sort of job that VIVO and Harvard Profiles and whatnot were designed for -- but don't underestimate the amount of gruntwork that putting together a proper publication list takes! (Faculty CVs tend to be stunningly inaccurate, and doing the work by searching databases misses a lot of stuff and runs into the very name-ambiguity problems that are the reason for ORCID in the first place.)
No, the population to be concerned about here is graduate students. When I was trying to hack some authority control (at least name-variant harmonizing and initials resolution) into the institutional repository I was running, graduate-student coauthors gave me FITS. They'd coauthor an article, write their dissertation (maybe), and disappear off the face of the earth. Getting them ORCIDs, perhaps as part of the dissertation process, would be a definite mitzvah.
As for data citation, there is no easy answer and the hard answer is "outreach and education."