Identifying and identifiers

ELAG 2014
Integrating ORCiD – A two way conversation
Tom Demeranville, software engineer specialising in digital identifiers and identities at the British Library

(see description of the talk)

ODIN (DataCite Interoperability Network) is concerned with linking authors with research output and is a 2-year project. It's also looking at datasets, grey literature, etc. What do we mean by identifying authors? The answer varies. One person can have lots of identifiers and profiles, including institutional profile, an ISNI, a ScopusID etc. or an ORCiD.

So the first distinction is between an identifier and a profile. We usually think of identifiers as unique ID but a profile can be much more. Another important point is that no one wants to type the same thing twice. Profiles can be automated or manual. Then there is the difference of identifiers as Institutions or Users, with conflicting notions of control but we all want disambiguation...

So what we need... One identifier and many profiles that solve different use cases.

ORCiD is meant to be a more open identifying system, managed for people with many different use cases. Relevant to publishers, unis, funders and libraries. It would help systems to talk to each other.

Ethos is e-Thesis Online Import. See demo at http://ethos-orcid.appspot.com

The ODIN project is working to integrate ORCiD and DataCite.