New DataCite / ORCID Integration Tool

A new service allows researchers to add research datasets – and other content with DataCite DOIs, including all figshare content – to their ORCID profile by integrating with the DataCite Metadata Store. The tool is an adaption (or fork) of the CrossRef Metadata Search developed by Karl Ward, and was developed by Gudmundur Thorisson and myself as part of work in the EU-funded ODIN project. More details can be found here.

There are many things I like about this new DataCite/ORCID integration tool:

• it makes it easier for researchers to get credit for their research outputs.
• it shows the value of persistent identifiers for data, publications and people, and linking them together
• it shows the Creative Commons licenses for DataCite content where this info is available, facilitating reuse of content
• it demonstrates the power of open source (thanks CrossRef!), open collaboration, standard REST APIs, and lightweight programming (Sinatra/Ruby) and deployment (Vagrant, Amazon EC2, Rackspace) tools
• it shows that we don’t need a single – often closed – system, but open services that build on top of each other using accepted community standards. Tools using the ORCID API can immediately reuse the new DataCite content, altmetrics provided by ImpactStory are a good example

I want to explore some of these ideas in the panel Attribution: Managing Provenance, Ethics, and Metrics at the combined ORCID/Dryad Meeting in Oxford next Thursday.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the European Union’s Horizon Seventh Framework programme under grant agreement No. 312788.