Editorial: ORCID is a Wonderful (But Not Required) Tool for Authors - Springer

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-03-18

Summary:

"Periods of history have been named for the tools of the day—stone age, stone tools; bronze age, bronze tools. We again live in an era of tools. Future archaeologists, no doubt, will devote some future annual meeting to coming up with a suitable name for our age. And like our Neolithic forebears, we must decide which tools to adopt, and how to integrate them into our busy lives. While swinging a stone hammer beat not having one every time, our choices today seem less clear. We often hear of new websites offering to help academic orthopaedic surgeons and musculoskeletal scientists track, promote, or disseminate their work. And like our prehistoric cousins, we are forced by time and evolution to decide whether to adopt new tools or risk extinction. Lately one new tool, ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), has garnered much attention. Even though ORCID has been available for several years, a surprising number of orthopaedic researchers and readers still do not know about it. In short summary, ORCID is an international nonprofit effort to provide every researcher with a unique identification number, (which ORCID calls an “iD”). While ORCID is not the first player in the sphere of author identification, it seems to have become the dominant one. In partnership with universities, publishers, and societies, as of January 2016 ORCID has issued nearly 2 million iDs [5]. The green icon in my byline above means I have one of them. ORCID’s chief benefit is disambiguation. While each of us is unique, most of our names are not, and this can make it difficult for universities, grant funding agencies, and others to link us correctly to our publications. For example, as of this writing, the most-common names in the United States and China (J Smith and W Zhang) were linked to 22,257 and 26,279 manuscripts, respectively, on PubMed. That’s quite a CV. ORCID seeks to solve this problem by allowing each author who signs up to receive a unique identifier at no charge ... Because of these benefits, a number of journals, societies, and publishers have decided to make ORCID a requirement to publish work with them [6]. Some of these are among the largest names in the world of scholarly publishing—including the journals Science and Public Library of Science, as well as the Royal Society, the major scientific academy in the United Kingdom.  CORR ® will not be joining them in requiring the use of ORCID, at least not now.  Why not? The major benefit to a journal, as noted, is disambiguation. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the last-two letters of its acronym, ORCID does not reliably identify that an author is who he or she claims to be. Even though it is not marketed as a validation tool, the self-described 'registry of unique researcher identifiers' lends an air of confirmation or substantiation of an author’s identity when an ORCID iD is attached to a published manuscript. As a colleague stated in response to some enthusiastic promotion of ORCID on a scholarly-publishing blog [3], 'The problem is not that ORCID does not validate identification, the problem is that it is not obvious that ORCID does not validate identification.' Stated otherwise, ORCID provides disambiguation where authors who play fair are concerned, but it is easily subverted by authors who do not work according to commonly held standards of authorship responsibility [1] ..."

Link:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11999-016-4760-0/fulltext.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.orcid oa.tools oa.debates oa.policies oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.editorials

Date tagged:

03/18/2016, 12:57

Date published:

03/18/2016, 08:57