{"id":216565,"date":"2016-05-02T18:00:12","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T21:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=216565"},"modified":"2016-05-03T12:46:27","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T15:46:27","slug":"an-id-card-for-researchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/an-id-card-for-researchers\/","title":{"rendered":"An ID card for researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ORCID_238\"<\/a>Within the next few months, the 3,500 professors at S\u00e3o Paulo State University (Unesp) will be invited to register with the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) and receive an identification number that will serve as their digital signature within the worldwide scientific environment, eliminating confusion among people who share the same name.\u00a0 When they submit an article to a scientific journal, for example, they will simply need to provide their personal 16-digit sequence, like the number on a credit card, so that their information, such as name, standardized signature, and affiliation are entered in the fields on the form.<\/p>\n

This is one of the most obvious uses of the registration code, but there are broader applications.\u00a0 Users may, if desired, construct a profile listing their academic production, thus building a sort of certified academic r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u00a0 Their new papers will be automatically retrievable since the unique identification number is connected to databases of scientific journals and repositories maintained by institutions affiliated with the system.\u00a0 Prior scientific production can also be captured.\u00a0 A user may exchange data between academic and professional profiles, such as the ResearcherID created by Thomson Reuters, the Scopus and Mendeley systems from publisher Elsevier, or LinkedIn.\u00a0 This way a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 with certified information can be made accessible by editors and reviewers of scientific journals, funding agencies, and evaluation programs.<\/p>\n

Authors pay no fee to register, but institutions will pay an annual fee to join the platform, which covers systems integration and support.\u00a0 The intention of Unesp is to refine the identification of its affiliates in its institutional repository, which holds data on 92,000 items of scientific production by the university\u2019s professors and researchers.\u00a0 Building the repository started from zero a little more than two years ago and sought to meet a FAPESP need to collect, preserve, and give open access to scientific production by researchers from the three S\u00e3o Paulo state universities.<\/p>\n

That effort, says Flavia Maria Bastos, coordinator of the Unesp libraries and institutional repository program, required painstaking treatment of the data on professors available in scientific journal databases and in the Lattes CV Platform in order to identify the production by each one of them, despite their not having used a standardized signature for all their articles\u2014it is common to find different abbreviations of signatures, especially when an author has several surnames.\u00a0 \u201cNow when a Unesp professor publishes a scientific article, our system will be able to retrieve the data about that paper immediately and link it to the professor\u2019s scientific production,\u201d Bastos says.\u00a0 \u201cThis means we will have quality data on the production by each researcher in every department of Unesp and the university as a whole.\u00a0 Even today, despite the efforts to create the repository, some of our production is hidden because of ambiguities in the names of the researchers and of Unesp itself.\u00a0 Our acronym is sometimes confused with that of USP (University of S\u00e3o Paulo) and even of Paulista University, which is Unip.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collection task<\/strong>
\nUnesp is the first Brazilian institution to join ORCID, but it will probably soon have company.\u00a0 The University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) also plans to join, in 2016.\u00a0 USP, whose repository established in 1985 contains more than 700,000 records, in addition to hard copies, of the intellectual production by its researchers, plans to use the universal registry to automate the retrieval of scientific production, thus facilitating the task of collection.\u00a0 Currently, the Integrated Library System of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (SIBi) records the name of each of the researchers in scientific publication databases in order to receive alerts when their scientific articles are published.\u00a0 The next step is to download copies of the documents and preserve them in the repository.\u00a0 \u201cWe want to use ORCID to facilitate tracking and bring the metadata from the various sources that can be interconnected via a unique identification number, like ResearcherID.\u00a0 That tool will enable the university to monitor its intellectual productivity using the indicators,\u201d says Maria Fazanelli Crestana, coordinator of the USP Integrated Library System.<\/p>\n

ORCID is a non-profit organization that combines records from 1.78 million researchers, mainly in the United States and Europe.\u00a0 About 28,000 Brazilian researchers have already registered.\u00a0 In May 2015, the organization set up an office in S\u00e3o Paulo in order to expand its presence in Latin America.\u00a0 In addition to the recent agreement with Unesp, ORCID has now obtained affiliations from the virtual library known as Red de Revistas Cient\u00edficas de Am\u00e9rica Latina y el Caribe, Espa\u00f1a y Portugal<\/i><\/em> (The Scientific Information System Redalyc) based in Mexico, and the National Science, Technology, and Technological Innovation Council, a Peruvian government scientific planning agency that wants to integrate the r\u00e9sum\u00e9s of Peruvian researchers with ORCID.\u00a0 \u201cWe are in talks with Brazilian officials about the possibility of integrating into ORCID the data from the Lattes Platform, which has more than 4 million r\u00e9sum\u00e9s from Brazilian researchers and students,\u201d says Lilian Pessoa, a historian educated at USP who has become ORCID\u2019s representative for Latin America.<\/p>\n

The platform was developed in the United States in 2011 with the goal of circumventing a problem for universities, publishers of scientific publications, and libraries: the difficulty in distinguishing among authors who have very common surnames and identifying their academic production.\u00a0 The growing weight of China in international science circles has made it even more challenging to identify the production by people who bear the same names.\u00a0 The fact is that 85% of Chinese share a set of just over 100 surnames.\u00a0 \u201cORCID solves the problem of the ambiguity, since no two researchers have the same identification number,\u201d Pessoa says.\u00a0 \u201cIf a researcher changes her surname when she gets married, her ORCID code will stay the same and there will be no problem identifying her production,\u201d explains Antonio \u00c1lvaro Ranha Neves, a professor at the Federal University of the ABC and an enthusiastic user of the new platform who registered in 2013 and became the initiative\u2019s ambassador in Brazil.\u00a0 As a volunteer, his job is to promote the code\u2019s use in the academic world.\u00a0 \u201cORCID can even be used to identify authors on their personal websites and blogs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of an individual registry for researchers is not new.\u00a0 In 2008, Thomson Reuters created ResearcherID, a code that identifies researchers and consolidates their scientific production as recorded in the journal database Web of Science (WoS).\u00a0 Elsevier, the publisher that maintains the Scopus journal database, introduced the similar Scopus Author Identifier just as Google was developing ScholarID, which captures scientific production from several Internet sources and builds researcher profiles, even offering indicators such as a scholar\u2019s citations and h-index.\u00a0 \u201cThose initiatives had a limitation.\u00a0 ResearcherID and Scopus are owned by companies that are trying to sell services and indicators and their results are open only to subscribers,\u201d says Neves.\u00a0 \u201cIn addition, they are based on a specific set of journals, the ones indexed in each database, so not all of an individual\u2019s production.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graduates<\/strong>
\nThe advantage that ORCID has over other systems is that its registry is capable of retrieving data from any source that accepts the identifier as a reference, including databases of indexed journals, institutional repositories, thesis banks, and even profiles from academic social networks.\u00a0 The platform was created with the support of scientific publishing houses such as the Nature<\/i><\/em> group, interested in improving the flow and reliability of scientific article metadata (data on the data) and facilitating the work of editors and reviewers in evaluating manuscripts.\u00a0 Several universities in the United States, like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), joined the initiative.\u00a0 \u201cBoston University adopted ORCID not only for its professors and researchers, but even for undergraduate students.\u00a0 BU can use it to evaluate the production by its graduates and follow the course of their professional careers,\u201d Antonio Neves says.<\/p>\n

In countries like Portugal and Italy, ORCID has been adopted by government agencies to identify researcher production.\u00a0 The resource is gaining fans in the United Kingdom, where the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), one of the organizations responsible for the expensive and meticulous evaluation of the country\u2019s universities that is conducted every five years, has begun to encourage researchers to register in order to make their production more visible.\u00a0 Funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, introduced the registry into their evaluation systems and have begun to require that researchers who apply for funding use the identification number.<\/p>\n

Abel Packer, coordinator of the Brazilian digital library SciELO, which maintains 280 journals on an open-access basis, says there is an irreversible trend toward adopting ORCID but it is proceeding very slowly.\u00a0 \u201cGrowth has been constant, but we have not seen the boom we were expecting,\u201d he says.\u00a0 The manuscript submission form used for submitting manuscripts from more than a hundred journals to the SciELO has an optional field for inclusion of the ORCID number.\u00a0 \u201cBut only 5% of authors are providing their data, a rate similar to what we\u2019re seeing with journals from other countries,\u201d he says.\u00a0 The ideal, according to Packer, would be for scientific journals and funding agencies to make inclusion of the registry mandatory.\u00a0 \u201cORCID will only achieve widespread use, like the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) identification system used to identify scientific articles, if it is obligatory.\u00a0 Large-scale adhesion to the Lattes Platform occurred when it became mandatory for graduate students and professors,\u201d he says.\u00a0 \u201cBut many scientific journals resist requiring the registration because they are afraid of scaring off authors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason that consolidation of ORCID is occurring slowly, in Packer\u2019s opinion, is that too many authors have not yet realized how useful the registry can be, and the same is true of universities, publishers, and agencies.\u00a0 \u201cA hefty contingent of researchers maintains profiles on scientific social networks like ResearchGate, www.Academia.edu<\/a> and Mendeley, where they gather and publish their scientific works.\u00a0 For many of them, signing up for ORCID is just another task toward achieving the same objective,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Packer says that an essential step toward disseminating ORCID in Brazil would be to integrate it into the Lattes Platform.\u00a0 \u201cIt would be very useful for Brazilian researchers if the information they have already recorded in their Lattes r\u00e9sum\u00e9s were retrieved automatically by ORCID,\u201d says the SciELO coordinator, arguing that Lattes urgently needs to reinvent itself.\u00a0 \u201cThe Brazilian platform needs to undergo radical innovation if it is not to be left behind.\u00a0 It was developed as a unique database of r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, an example for the rest of the world, but in recent years it should have changed to become a social network on which researchers could engage in networking and even work on virtual teams, as happened with Mendeley or ResearchGate.\u00a0 Lattes\u2019s loss of influence and the barriers erected to the access and exchange of data are tragic developments that reveal the difficulty Brazil has in innovating,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brazilian institutions begin to adopt the ORCID identifier code","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[243,215],"coauthors":[98],"class_list":["post-216565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policies-st-en","tag-innovation","tag-scientometrics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216565"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=216565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}