Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Open Access Identifiers for Australian Researchers

Australia's most effective open access advocate, Arthur Sale, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at University of Tasmania, has circulated a document to help academics implement ORCID Open Access Identifiers for Australian Researchers, entitled "Everyone needs an ORCID" on the Australian Open Access Support Group discussion list:
All academics, all researchers, and all librarians should have an ORCID. It is an essential part of keeping track of your identity as you publish material, get grants, and gain impact, and it is an open process (not proprietary). The following outlines what an ORCID is, why you need one and why you should populate the ORCID database, and suggests what all Open Access advocates should do about ORCIDs.

You need to keep all your research publications and datasets linked and identified to you. If you ever change employment you will quickly realize the value of this. Commercial systems such as ScopusID, Researcher ID and LinkedIn are also inadequate as they are proprietary. People whose names are very common (like Robert Smith, John White, Nguyen T) will especially find an ORCID invaluable. At the time of writing, ORCID had issued close to 2 million IDs worldwide. ...
  1. Every academic staff member and volunteer in your university should have an ORCID. Pressure your VC and DVC (Research). Automation can help.
  2. No academic person should be appointed unless they have or register an ORCID before taking up the position, as a condition of appointment and registered in the staff database. Ideally, the requirement should be noted in the position description and the data should accompany the application.
  3. Every PhD candidate in the university should also be required to gain an ORCID as a component of the confirmation process.
  4. The ORCID should be included in every email signature in the university... 
  5. The ORCID should be cited in all communications regarding the person in relation to research or publication, especially grant applications. It should be associated with all publications and datasets. The QR code may be used on print publications, but in email and websites the URL is preferred. In particular, the performance evaluation form should require a field for the staff member’s ORCID.
  6. Members of the university should be required to commit to populating their ORCID records with new publications, grants, alternative names, etc. They should also link their ScopusID and Researcher IDs to the ORCID. This can be automated. ... 
From "Everyone needs an ORCID", by Arthur Sale
Also Dr Danny Kingsley, Head of Scholarly Communications at University of Cambridge will be speaking on "Open Access: Putting an octopus into a string bag" at University of Bedfordshire (UK), 17 February 2016. Danny uses the metaphor of an Octopus to describe the difficulty of dealing with the many aspects publications policy at universities.

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