JISC

Tuesday 11 November 2014

External Academic Repositories and ORCID


As part of Information Services and Systems' ORCID outreach programme we have been conducting interviews with academic colleagues in order to better understand there publishing workflows. Part of the interview process has related to identifying preferred open access publishing platforms by specific discipline as alternatives to large publisher or institutional repositories (such as Swansea University's Cronfa). In particular we have been talking to physicists working in the area of high energy physics at our College of Science about how they go about publicizing their research and in particular how we can encourage use of ORCID and submission into our Research Information System (RIS).

In the world of physics the challenge of Open Access Publishing appears to have been solved a long time ago with the creation of websites such as arxiv.org and INSPIRE. In a brilliant example of grass routes activity our colleagues in physics have independently contacted INSPIRE to ask if they can provide a 'connector' between their repository and ORCID to allow staff with ORCIDs to 'claim' their works published on INSPIRE without having to type the details into ORCID. The folks at INSPIRE responded very quickly and set up the connector which is live now.

This is a really good example of something quite simple that can be accomplished in a very short time that has massive benefits for a discipline such as high energy physics. With the existence of this connector our colleagues are now much more likely to surface their works in our internal RIS system as soon as we implement our own connector to the ORCID public API as discussed in last month's post. And it all happened with minimal fuss or involvement from us in IT services too! If this model could be made to work for other discipline centric online databases the life of the RIS manager would be made so much easier.

Whiskeys all round!