OpenSocial Gadget Contest

Adding new features to Profiles and/or VIVO

ORCID gadget

Proposal Status: 

With ORCID launching in October, there is motivation for both VIVO and Profiles to actively support what is hoped to be major community shift to use of unique author IDs.  This gadget could be added to user profile pages to:

 

(a) encourage and facilitate ORCID registration,

 

(b) display that someone has registered an ORCID as well as link to it, and

 

(c) help to keep local and ORCID profiles in sync.

 

There are probably other benefits to attaching an ORCID to a VIVO or Profiles user page in terms of things like connected SEO, web indexing, and facilitating linking of open data in general.

 

See also contest proposal for "Harmonize Profiles Gadget".

Comments

I love the concept behind ORCID and hope that it is wildly successful. Having unique IDs for researchers is way overdue in my opinion. It would solve so many data issues.

I imagine the RDF in Profiles 1.0 could easily support the ID and the gadget would focus more on items (b) and (c).  Please say more about (c). What do you envision the sequence of events to be for synchronization?

ORCID is just getting going, so is not quite yet mature.  It is also not yet widely used.  So in the beginning, what I'd think to have for (c) is the ability to upload publication lists, etc. from Profiles or VIVO up into ORCID to populate that system.  Initially I'd think this would be manually initiated by the user.

 

As this all matures, you can imagine a more automated process -- perhaps email notifications of profile changes that need to be sync'd.

 

One day when ORCID is wildly successful, there may need to be a way to pull publications lists down from that "system of record" into Profiles or VIVO.

The very act of listing an ORCID for every supported researcher could be a useful mechanism to remind researchers that ORCIDs exist. This would work better, of course, if UCSF were to handle the issuance of ORCIDs for all their researchers and having them listed in a central database, rather than making individuals register for them one at a time.

I agree that this idea could be very relevant to the long-term success of research networking systems. 

Another reason why this is interesting is that it could help moving research networking systems into the realm of usage-based/impact-based publication metrics. ImpactStory, one of the leading intitiatives in the field, was one of the ORCID launch partners. In additon, ScienceCard, another tool that helps explore how research impact can be collected and displayed, allows researchers to list all their publications, and the metrics associated with them. ORCID integrates with ScienceCard (free public ORCID API).

This gadget would open up opportunities...

 

Selected comments from Reviewer(s):

Reviewer 1: "good idea, but not sure it will be perceived as a win by our audience, and will clutter (with no obvious value to the end user) an already busy interface"

Reviewer 2: "Awesomely useful, but lower impact than others."

On behalf of Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UCSF, thank you for participating in this contest.

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