A minimal standards approach to Unique Researcher Identifiers
Issues
The need to be able to uniquely identify researchers is well established with important use cases
identified for publishers, funders, institutions, and wider engagement of the public in science. A
number of local and global initiatives have been developed to deal with this including by the NCBI,
EMBL, and the largest and most coherent grouping, the ORCID[1] consortium. The NIH funded
VIVO[2] consortium is also an important player in this area. Political considerations make it
unlikely that any one approach will gain dominant adoption.
A Minimal Standards Approach
An approach to deal with the political reality is to take a minimal standards approach. The
terminology derives from data standards efforts in the biological sciences where a minimal set of
information is agreed by a community to describe a particular form of experiment. This approach
has been codified in the MIBBI consortium[3], which aims to provide such standards across a range
of biological experiment types.
At a technical level such a concept can readily leverage open ended machine readable internet
standards such as RDF[4] and XML[5] where a set of specific tags can be specified as required but
where a user, or a community, can choose to add additional tags or information without a risk of
breaking machine reading processes that are only looking for a subset. Additionally existing
vocabularies can be used effectively in combination with new to add richness.
If such community approaches become widely adopted there is a tendency for reinforcement to
occur, as tools for creating, and reading such information will tend to default to these slightly richer
forms, allowing the standard to grow organically. Clearly the disadvantage is that multiple such
approaches can arise and standardization later becomes more difficult.
Simplest technical implementation
An approach that is consistent with semantic web principles but which is nonetheless simple to
implement would simply require researchers to obtain a web page, with a specific URL, and for that
web page to contain an RDF or XML tag that indicates that it is acting as a researcher identifier. This
page could be a personal web page, an institutional web page, a web page on the proposed ORCID
service or on any other service. This page could, but would not need to support additional
functionality that the user desired including an OpenID[6]. Such an approach could be easily
implemented by significant players and could be supported on a range of popular open source web
platforms through plugins.
It would be useful for a minimal standard to specify some additional required information such as
the name or names the person has published under, current or recent institutions, publications list
or other information but this is not necessary. Thus a very basic standard could provide real value.
Such a general approach can also provide freedom for researchers to control their own identity
without resorting to the use of third party or institutional services.
Major issues
In the initial stages many researchers will reach for a default option that is available to them,
probably ORCID or an institutional web page. Many institutions may try to mandate that staff use
an institutional web page as an identifier. As awareness and sophistication grows there will
probably be a significant number of researchers that wish to migrate their page which will break
aggregation setups. There will be a need to agree a redirection approach very early on and to
demand adoption of this as a standard. Many standard CMS systems may struggle to enable this and
to enable the insertion of by default and this could cause significant issues.
References:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The ORCID initiative. http://www.orcid.org/
The VIVO consortium. http://www.vivoweb.org/
MIBBI: Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations. http://mibbi.org
Resource Description Framework, W3C. http://www.w3.org/RDF/
Extensible Markup Language, W3C. http://www.w3.org/XML/
OpenID Foundation. http://openid.net/