We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications

Miriam Baglioni,Alessia Bardi,Paolo Manghi,Andrea Mannocci

doi:10.5334/dsj-2021-038

Miriam Baglioni, Alessia Bardi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-038

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Abstract

Since 2012, the “Open Researcher and Contributor ID” organisation (ORCID) has been successfully running a worldwide registry, with the aim of “providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities”. Any service in the scholarly communication ecosystem (e.g., publishers, repositories, CRIS systems, etc.) can contribute to a non-ambiguous scholarly record by including, during metadata deposition, referrals to iDs in the ORCID registry. The OpenAIRE Research Graph is a scholarly knowledge graph that aggregates both records from the ORCID registry and publication records with ORCID referrals from publishers and repositories worldwide to yield research impact monitoring and Open Science statistics. Graph data analytics revealed “anomalies” due to ORCID registry “misapplications”, caused by wrong ORCID referrals and misexploitation of the ORCID registry. Albeit these affect just a minority of ORCID records, they inevitably affect the quality of the ORCID infrastructure and may fuel the rise of detractors and scepticism about the service. In this paper, we classify and qualitatively document such misapplications, identifying five ORCID registrant-related and ORCID referral-related anomalies to raise awareness among ORCID users. We describe the current countermeasures taken by ORCID and, where applicable, provide recommendations. Finally, we elaborate on the importance of a community-steered Open Science infrastructure and the benefits this approach has brought and may bring to ORCID.

Highlights

A precise and reliable identification of researchers and the pool of works and knowledge they contributed to would greatly benefit scholarly communication practices and facilitate the understanding of science (Haak et al, 2018)
We describe two classes of misapplications that emerged while tackling the consistency and quality of the information released in the OpenAIRE Research Graph: ORCID registry misapplications, i.e., users abusing of or making mistakes while using ORCID, and ORCID referral misapplications, i.e., users making mistakes referring to ORCID iDs from scholarly communication services
This section elaborates on actions that could be undertaken to lower the effects of the misapplication identified above, again partitioning between actions related to the ORCID registry and actions related to ORCID referrals

Summary

Introduction

A precise and reliable identification of researchers and the pool of works and knowledge they contributed to would greatly benefit scholarly communication practices and facilitate the understanding of science (Haak et al, 2018). Several studies showed what can be achieved by pursuing researchers’ productivity and affiliations: from understanding career trajectories and citation dynamics, to analysing collaboration networks and migration pathways in academia (Warner, 2010; Zeng et al, 2017; Fortunato et al, 2018). Since 2012, ORCID (Haak et al, 2012), the “Open Researcher and Contributor ID” organisation, has been successfully running a worldwide registry, which allows researchers and collaborators, hereafter ORCID registrants, to mint alphanumeric iDs and maintain a core set of relevant information such as name, surname, affiliations, works, and projects in their so-called “ORCID records”. Scholarly communication data sources – e.g., institutional and thematic repositories, publishers, Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) systems, data repositories, etc. – are increasingly including references to author ORCID iDs, hereafter ORCID referrals, in the bibliographic metadata of their research products.

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