Launch of new ORCID education and outreach resources!

Today (16 October 2017) is ORCID’s fifth birthday, and the launch of the new education and outreach resources – the products of the project I’ve been working on since joining ORCID in March 2017.  Find out more on the ORCID blog: Celebrating ORCID@5 with the launch of new resources!

I’ve learned a lot during the process, including how to add .srt captions to videos, organise and manage working groups across 18 hours’ time difference, and wrangling metadata in Figshare.

Many people were involved in bringing all this together: members of the Meerkat, Giraffe, and Eagle working groups, ORCID Ambassadors, colleagues in the Community Team and Development Team at ORCID, film stars of the future who participated in the Why ORCID? video, people who worked on translations, and those who are now spreading the word about these new materials across the world…

To mark the occasion and thank everyone who contributed, I hosted two (for different time zones) virtual launch parties, and here is the order of service:

Education & outreach launch party menu

Thanks to my colleague Gabi for the artwork and the inspired drinks list 🙂 I’m off to enjoy something suitably alcoholic before starting work on phase two of this project tomorrow…

 

 

My ORCID iD in action

After all this time telling other people about the benefits of ORCID, I was very pleased be be able to interact with several integrations this week!  I agreed to do some peer review for a journal, and was able to use my ORCID credentials at several stages in the process:

1 .Logging in to ScholarOne Manuscripts via ORCID is a breeze

Logging in to ScholarOne Manuscripts using my ORCID account (I would otherwise have had to create a new account and manually enter data into a form)

2. Authorising Wiley (ScholarOne Manuscripts) to read and update my record means reduced data entry for me, and the information they push to update my record is validated, not simply self-asserted

Granting permission for Wiley (ScholarOne Manuscripts) to read and update my record

3. Authorising Publons to get my ORCID iD

Granting permission for Publons to get my ORCID iD

4. When the peer review process is complete and the article is published, this will show up on my ORCID record under the Peer Review section.  And all I had to do was grant permission for this to happen…

Have you got your ORCID iD yet? Registration is free and fast – register today!

Crossref LIVE London

On 26th September, I attended Crossref LIVE in London, one of their series of local outreach meetings.  These are aimed at “the whole community, welcoming publishers, librarians, researchers, funders, technology providers, and members alike to share their thoughts and to find out more about who we are and how to get the most out of Crossref”.

What’s new at Crossref (Ed Pentz) (slides)

Crossref’s free-to-attend global annual meeting (#LIVE17) will take place in Singapore on 14-15 November 2017

A reminder of Crossref’s basic truths:

• Smart alone, brilliant together
• If you publish, you’re a publisher
• One member, one vote
• Love metadata, love technology
• Politic, not political
• Here today, here tomorrow

16-member board of directors. Elections are coming up in November

Numbers to date: 91.6 million Crossref-registered DOIs. 8,793 Crossref member organisations. More info on the Crossref Dashboard

Crossref collaborates with ORCID, COUNTER, DataCite, CLOCKSS, I40C, JATS, CHORUS, SHARE, Scholix & more…

New initiatives (Geoffrey Bilder) (slides)

Organization Identifier Working Group – we’ve got persistent identifiers for objects (DOIs), people (ORCID iDs), and this is next piece of the puzzle.  Organisation identifiers are a different type of problem from person iDs – organisations can merge, split, go bankrupt and reinvent themselves, have legal entity names often different from common names (e.g. “Harvard University”, formerly “Harvard College”, formally “The President and Fellows of Harvard College“) so the data model is harder.

Outputs from this project will be open.  The organisational iDs dataset will be around 75,000 iDs – much smaller than Crossref, ORCID, and Datacite are used to!  Most likely use case is providing controlled vocabulary for organisation names (institution lookup).

Simple comparison widget – shows importance of including country name

No hierarchy info so can’t link a departmental entry to top-level entry for an organisation.  Can compare affiliation matching – search across grid.ac, Open ISNI, Wikidata and others and see results from each.  It even works for collegiate universities e.g. Jesus College will find matches for Oxford and Cambridge.

Why didn’t this project use Ringgold as a starting point? Ringgold is proprietary and didn’t give Crossref the whole dataset, but there is some representation of it in Open ISNI.

How to build it, manage it, fund it? Questions for the organisation identifier group…

Metadata 2020 (Ginny Hendricks) (slides)

Looking to tell a broader story about the point of richer metadata.

Prototype of a participation report – Elsevier contribute a lot

Many publishers didn’t know what metadata they were giving Crossref as they had outsourced that responsibility. The participation report above shows how much is being contributed in terms of: funding information, award numbers, license URLs, preference lists, full-text URLs, ORCID iDs, Crossmark data.  Encourage publishers to engage with data sharing.

Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society.

• Richer: Richer metadata fuels discoverability and innovation.
• Connected: Connected metadata bridges the gaps between systems and communities.
• Reusable: Reusable, open metadata eliminates duplication of effort.

Join the growing numbers of advisors and advocates for Metadata2020!

Global reach of Crossref Metadata (Rachael Lammey) (slides)

What do people do with Crossref metadata? Search, discovery, mining services.  Crossref metadata is used all over the world, with particularly rapid growth in Asia Pacific.

Bbibliographic management software also uses Crossref metadata.  Authorea, Pensoft,  ARPHA, and RIO Journal all use Crossref API for “cite while you write” functionality.

Other uses include library systems, manuscript tracking systems, scholarly sharing, specialist subject databases, author profiling tools.

This leads to  conversations like “we’d love to see rights-declaration metadata”…

Metadata use Case Studies, Coko Foundation (Jure Triglav) (slides)

Jure facing a world of metadata standards, organisations, and jargon

Jure used an effort vs impact quadrant to sort e.g. high impact/low effort = things to be investigate. Clear that any successful projects would involve considerable effort and many stakeholders.

New Product Developments (Jennifer Lin) (slides)

Quick plug for PIDapalooza, the festival of persistent identifiers: 23-24 January 2018, Girona (Spain)

What is metadata? Data about data, but this doesn’t capture all the ways researchers use it in the digital environment, nor how it is no longer centrally controlled and curated

Infrastructure for scholarly discussion

New content type: Reviews

Event data

See the live demo of events flowing through Crossref Event Data (I could watch this for hours).

Data and software citations

Crossref future direction (Ed Pentz) (slides)

A reminder about the guidelines for correct display of DOIs (see also Guidelines on the display of ORCID iDs and DataCite DOI Display Guidelines)

THE OFFICIAL DOI DISPLAY GUIDELINES HAVE CHANGED

Crossref’s strategic planning exercise involved identifying organisational strengths, and future critical uncertainties

Opportunities to expand constituencies and sevices, radically simplify services, track provenance and relationships with metadata, build quality control for metadata, implement open source across scholarly comms…

“#opensource, which is collectively beneficial to full scholarly publishing industry and scholarly communication more broadly”

The meeting concluded with discussion, data, and drinks. Thank you to Crossref and all the attendees for a lively and thought-provoking event!

The Persistence of Identifiers

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (1931)

Have you ever followed a link only to find a 404 error instead of the page you wanted?  This is called link rot.  Where content “lives” on the internet can be unstable for  a number of reasons, such as removal of content, website restructuring, and changes to domain names (hello SAGE Journals and Oxford Academic (OUP) who both have migrations in progress at the moment).  Alongside link rot, trust and authority control (establishment and maintenance of consistent forms of terms) can be difficult to establish on the web.

A persistent identifier (PI or PID) is a long-lasting reference to a document, file, web page, or other object.  Using PIDs helps to combat problems of link rot and authority control.  There are different sorts of PIDs depending of the type of entity being referred to:

• A digital object identifier (DOI) (such as those registered with Crossref) is used to uniquely identify objects, particularly electronic documents such as journal articles.  Loyal readers of this blog may remember Crossref as the sponsor of 23 Things Oxford back in 2010 🙂
• An ORCID iD uniquely identifies researchers – here is my ORCID iD.  ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

Bibliographic identifiers such as ISBN and ISSN have been in use since the 1970s.  As ISBN is to a book, DOI is to an article, and ORCID iD to a person.

ORCID iDs identifying researchers and adding Linked Data goodness

Your ORCID iD connects with your ORCID Record that can contain links to your research activities, affiliations, awards, other versions of your name, and more. You control this content and who can see it.  Sign up for an ORCID iD today!

Further reading: Persistent identifiers – an overview by Juha Hakala, and watch this quick Crossref video about how technology helps connect metadata in scholarly research:

Supporting Evolving Research Needs

My notes from yesterday’s “Supporting Evolving Research Needs” conference organised by ALISS, the Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences.

1. The Systematic Review – is the social sciences librarian involved? If not, why not?

Alan Gomersall, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Evidence & Policy, King’s College London

Alan spoke of his experience of working with academics involved in doing systematic reviews to inform national policy.  He found that the academics only searched one database (Medline) and did not use synonyms or broader/narrower keywords, or related terms, when searching.  He and a colleague wrote a paper about this, to try to find out why the academics’ research skills were so poor.

His paper identified weaknesses in the systematic review process e.g. Academics ignoring all grey literature on the grounds that it wasn’t peer-reviewed.

Home Office guidelines for systematic review focus on synthesis of findings, not search strategies.  Alan’s work shows that key UK information is being systematically excluded in favour of information from the big-name US databases.

Possible points of failure:

• Uni library fails to invest in appropriate databases
• Social sciences librarian & academic staff fail to work together
• Academic’s poor search skills
• Too much trust placed in WoK, Sociological Abstracts etc
• Social sciences librarian never leaves confines of the library

Alan encourages everyone to trial/subscribe to Social Policy & Practice, good source of UK info

Further questions

• Are UK unis ignorant of the many excellent but small social science databases?
• Are UK database producers failing to market
• Are UK library schools limiting student training to a few well-know US services which offer discounts for educational purposes e.g. WoK?
• Influence of Campbell Collaboration and refusal  by many US databases to accept grey literature

Social sciences librarians must engage with their academics!

Evidence Network site – option to sign up for Alan’s free bimonthly newsletter

Miggie Pickton argues for librarians to be involved in systematic reviews and included in research bids

Centre for Research & Dissemination at York Uni – set good standard

2. What did I do wrong?”a project to support independent learning practices to avoid plagiarism

Helen Hathaway, Liaison Team Manager Science and Information Skills Coordinator,  University of Reading Library

Panic, stress, anxiety, confusion – lots of emotional issues about plagiarism and referencing

Does TurnItIn help with academic practice/referencing? Mixed answers.  May sensitise students to good practice.  Some academics report that it fails to detect plagiarism.

Referen©ite, Uni of Auckland – student voice videos give perspectives on importance of correct referencing e.g. Shows respect to predecessors’ ideas

Uni of Reading have developed re-purposeable resources toolkit – “Academic integrity toolkit”.  Aimed at academics.  It’s meant to be bites iced and incorporated into teaching, not just given out to students for them to read (/ignore).  Considering publishing it as an Open Educational Resource.  For now, guest access to their Blackboard can be arranged.  Contact details here.

Results of research

• Crucial to go beyond formatting and show role of correct referencing in academic writing
• Many students failed to engage with skills training
• Students report lack of consistency and difficulty in finding guidance
• Implications of alternative academic cultures and experiences (international students)

3. Supporting the Research data management [RDM] process – a guide for Librarians

John Southall, LSE Data Librarian

Digital media formats aren’t future-proof, and researchers have trouble referring back to their notices from 5, 10 years ago if they can no longer open files, or no longer have appropriate disk drive

Strengths of digital media are that it is easily stored, produces perfect copies, great potential for sharing and re-use

RDM includes docs, spreadsheets, research notebooks/codebooks, questionnaires, transcripts, audio, images, videotapes.  A lot of data is generated before any paper is drafted.

UK Data Archive – best practice for creating, preparing, storing and sharing data

Research data objects are acquired or generated during the research process.  Includes protocols and methodologies

Common themes in RDM:

• Storage and preservation issues
• Metadata
• Research ethics (of data creation, of sharing)
• Data management plan and planning

Other resources:

• Edinburgh Data Library – Mantra
• Uni of Bristol – data.bris
• Uni of Oxford – DaMaRO

Not just compliance.  Consider what you would do if you lost your research data tomorrow…

Contact details for John

4. Identifiers for Researchers and Data: Increasing Attribution and Discovery

John Kaye, Lead Curator Digital Social Science, British Library

ODIN = ORCiD (Open Research Contributor iD) and DataCite Interoperability Network

Identifiers such as DOIs uniquely identify research objects.  DOIs assigned by DataCite and CrossRef.  I think the difference is that DataCite makes DOIs for things that aren’t articles, whereas CrossRef assigns DOIs for articles.  ARK = archival research key, a URL to create a persistent identifier.

ImpactStory – view impact of your work using traditional citation metrics and social citations.  Log in using ORCiD details.  See also this introduction to using ImpactStory.

5. Sharing information literacy teaching materials openly: Experiences of the CoPILOT project

Nancy Graham, Subject Advisor (Medicine), University of Birmingham and Dr Jane Secker, Copyright and Digital Literacy Advisor, LSE

OER = open educational resources.  Like CC licence for resources you’ve created.  OER Commons.  OERs are complementary to Open Access, MOOCs, RDM

DELILA = developing educators learning and information literatures for accreditation.  Cross-institutional project to adapt digital and IL [information literacy] resources to OER.

Project CoPILOT – funded by JISC/HEA and aimed to develop a strategy to promote international sharing.  Project is a sub-group of CILIP IL Group.

Mailing list: IL-OERS@jiscmail.ac.uk

Wiki: http://iloer.pbworks.com

Twitter: @CoPILOT2013

CoPILOT – like crowdsourcing of IL materials, gateway of links to sites where materials are hosted.  Good use of tags will be important.

6. Supporting research by becoming a researcher

Miggie Pickton, Research Support Librarian, Northampton University

Miggie’s slides from this presentation

My notes from a similar presentation at Umbrella 2011.  Contact details for Miggie.