ORCID is non-profit. There are some organisations, such as ORCID, who exist for the purpose of facilitating the academic publishing 'industry' rather than making money out of it.
Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.
I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing.
So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go.
Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.
Sure, I think that's what will happen. But I don't think there's any other way of doing it.
ORCID is solving the problem of identifying and crediting individual academics, not necessarily because the academics are frustrated (as, I think, is the motivation behind academia.edu) but for practical metadata reasons.
For sure lots of publishers are going to start saying 'do you have an ORCID?' and vice versa. I think the alternative is lots of publishers each saying 'could you log in to our custom identity service'. Around the circle we go, as you say. But what's wrong with that? It's all in the open, it's all documented, it's all (as far as I can tell) open source. And it's OAuth2 FWIW.
Comments
ORCID is non-profit. There are some organisations, such as ORCID, who exist for the purpose of facilitating the academic publishing 'industry' rather than making money out of it.
Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.
Uh, yes. Maybe I should clarify my own point.
I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing.
So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go.
Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.
Sure, I think that's what will happen. But I don't think there's any other way of doing it.
ORCID is solving the problem of identifying and crediting individual academics, not necessarily because the academics are frustrated (as, I think, is the motivation behind academia.edu) but for practical metadata reasons.
For sure lots of publishers are going to start saying 'do you have an ORCID?' and vice versa. I think the alternative is lots of publishers each saying 'could you log in to our custom identity service'. Around the circle we go, as you say. But what's wrong with that? It's all in the open, it's all documented, it's all (as far as I can tell) open source. And it's OAuth2 FWIW.
For the record, here's the list of members:
http://orcid.org/about/community/members
and sponsors:
http://orcid.org/about/community/sponsors