I’m speaking at the ORCID (Open Research and Contributor ID) Meeting at Harvard on May 18th. ORCID is a global initiative tackling the author name ambiguity issue, with over 200 participating organizations including academic institutions, publishers, societies, corporate, non-profit and government organizations.

Author names create a lot problems for repositories like SSRN. We often find errors and inconsistencies with common, hyphenated, and non-English names, especially those with foreign characters. The problem grows exponentially when you accept submissions from a variety of sources, each with their own quality criteria.  It is no longer accurate or reliable to depend on first name/last cataloging. Even before the dawn of the digital age, scholarly research and publishing struggled with this challenge and now, it has become an issue that needs to be resolved.

ORCID is a community of minds working to create a central registry/ID, where each author/contributor would have their own unique ID.

“Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature.”

A well written article released in WIRED explained that an ORCID ID would accumulate credit beyond published papers. For example, speaking, data, public outreach and blogging would be attributed to a single source or individual, basically “…anything that helps science but currently goes unrewarded.”

Beyond The Book recently interviewed Amy Brand, a member of the ORCID Initiative’s Board of Directors (and Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments at Harvard University). Amy provides a thorough overview of ORCID’s principles, vision and explains how it would improve efficiencies for all.

I’ll be discussing SSRN’s view on researcher ID systems – how a paper submitted by an author, their academic institution, a co-author or another publisher could be linked across all digital platforms. The real benefit of ORCID is that we will easily be able to connect the dots and allow readers to see author’s full body of work, the big picture … all in one picture.

I am very fortunate to love what I do, love the people with which I work, and have the experiences I get to have. My work includes wonderful discussions with very intelligent, interesting people that are very often in interesting academic settings.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. It is a breathtaking place!  However, even more incredible to me was that I was there to talk about repository technology!

I spent the day with Sally Rumsey, the Service Development Manager of the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA), and several librarians from Oxford University, learning about the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA). ORA has a forward thinking design and creative approach to partnerships.  ORA currently has over 2500 holdings from faculty at Oxford in a broad range of disciplines.  While I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the discussions, the best part of the day was the wonderful tour of Bodleian Library by the extremely knowledgeable Wilma Minty, Head of Catalogue Support Services at the Bodleian Library. If you ever get a chance for a tour with Wilma, TAKE IT! 

Note: Tip of the hat to Amy Brand, Program Manager of the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication, for the wonderful suggestion to stay at Malmaison Hotel. It is a former prison and I highly recommend it!