Short Conference Report from "The Value of Unique Scholarly Identifiers to Academics, Institutions and Countries"

Today ORCID participant The Association of Lithuanian Serials hosted a conference on unique author identifiers in Vilnius, Lithuania. The conference took place in the Lithuanian parliament (seimas) and was perfectly organized by our host Eleonora Dagienė. Three members of ORCID working groups presented at the conference, and their presentation files are now available in our presentations folder. 

Mike Taylor from Elsevier gave a nice introduction of why unique identifiers for researchers are important, and why using names or disambiguation algorithms only works most of the time. Particularly striking was his own example of him getting mixed up with another Mike Taylor. Mike also stressed in his presentation that ORCID will enable "not just one big thing", but rather many interesting uses, some of which we might not even know today.

Gudmundur Thorisson from Leicester University/University of Iceland spoke about contributor identification as a core challenge in data publication. He pointed out that ORCID will facilitate data citation, and this in turn will increase data sharing. And similar to Mike he also stressed that ORCID identifiers are intended not only for claiming publications and datasets, but for all relevant scholarly contributions.

My own presentation gave an overview of how ORCID tries to solve the problem of author name ambiguity, with a focus on what the first version of the ORCID software (phase I) will do and will not be able to do. I also gave a status update of ORCID, e.g. that ORCID has released two APIs (including a mock API server), is working hard to finish the phase I software, will soon hire the first permanent staff, and expects to launch the ORCID service in the summer. 

The three other presenters at the conference where Thomas Krichel (Open Access to Scholarly Metadata: Author Claiming and Institutional Identification), Janifer Gatenby (ISNI – International Standard Name Identifier for Creators and Organisations) and Eleonora Dagienė (The Survey on Data Gathering on Researcher Activities: Initial Findings). Eleonora showed preliminary results of a survey conducted with up until now more than 3,000 researchers about their attitudes towards collecting academic outputs. Most survey respondents had not yet heard of ORCID, and there were interesting differences in what information researchers found important (e.g. listing their presentations) and what their insitutitutions requested (e.g. patents).

More information about the conference can be found here.