Key Issue &lt;br&gt;Collective Action for the Open Researcher &amp; Contributor ID (ORCID)

Consol Garcia Gómez,Gudmundur A Thorisson,Martin Fenner

doi:10.1629/24277

Abstract

The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative was started in November 2009 to solve the author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication by establishing a global, open registry of unique identifiers for researchers. ORCID differs from other author identifier services in that ORCID will not be limited by discipline or geographic region, and more than 260 organizations worldwide are already participating in this international initiative. ORCID is guided by a set of principles that stress the openness of the organization.

Highlights

The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative was started in November 2009 to solve the author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication by establishing a global, open registry of unique identifiers for researchers[1]
What this means for the forthcoming launch of the ORCID service is that ORCID has to focus on incentives for individual groups of stakeholders, and that the adoption will happen in stages, adding value for a particular group at each stage
In this issue we describe four distinct stages of key importance in the anticipated adoption process of the ORCID service

Summary

The authors are members of the ORCID Outreach Working Group

The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative was started in November 2009 to solve the author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication by establishing a global, open registry of unique identifiers for researchers[1]. The ORCID query and deposit application programming interfaces (APIs) will be available in November 2011 These early APIs will initially only return mock data, but their main purpose is to allow developers to start integrating ORCID into their systems in anticipation of the launch of the public service. It is the perfect example for a collective action problem, described in detail by economist Mancur Olson in 19653: without selective incentives for participation, collective action is unlikely to occur even with large groups of people with common interests What this means for the forthcoming launch of the ORCID service is that ORCID has to focus on incentives for individual groups of stakeholders, and that the adoption will happen in stages, adding value for a particular group at each stage.

ORCID reaches critical number of claims

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