Tag Archives: ORCID

Breaking up with ResearchGate: Streamlining Scholarly Profile Online

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by Kathleen Reed
Vancouver Island University

I’ve finally had it with ResearchGate. After what feels like the hundredth time the site emailed me to ask “Did your colleague [name] publish [article]?”, I’m through. These nagging emails are annoying, and asking me to report on my colleagues crosses a line. Beyond my annoyance with spam email, though, lies a deeper question that I’ve been pondering lately: what does a manageable, well-curated online scholarly profile look like?

You’d think I would have a good answer to this question for myself, being a librarian that leads sessions on this very question. But up to this point, my profile is a mishmash of full-text and indexed publications, across multiple profile platforms. These include my institution’s digital repository, Twitter, ORCID, Google Scholar, Research Gate, and Academia.edu. I make all my work open access, but not in one central place.

I tell myself that this scatter-shot approach has been at least partially because I demonstrate multiple sites for other researchers as part of my job, and I need to be familiar with them. And I worry that I’ll be splitting my readership stats if I publish in an OA journal, and then turn around and put my work up OA somewhere else. Mostly, though, keeping all of my profiles updated is a time-consuming task and just doesn’t happen. Thus, I have a series of half-completed and stale profiles online – not exactly the scholarly image I wish to project, and certainly not what I preach in my sessions on the subject.

During the upcoming year I’m off on leave to start a PhD, and scholarly profile seems more important than ever before. Add to that the idea of not getting annoying ResearchGate emails, and I’m finding motivation to change my online profile. Yes, I know I can opt-out of ResearchGate emails and still have a presence on the site. But the monetizing of public scholarship on private platforms bothers me. I don’t want to promote that ResearchGate and Academia.edu are acceptable places to deposit OA versions – they’re not, according to the Tri-Agencies. So I’ve decided to focus on my institution’s IR, ORCID, and Google Scholar. Three places to update seems more manageable, and I like getting away from for-profit companies at least a little. See ya, ResearchGate.

How do you manage your scholarly profile online? If you feel like you’ve got a system that works, what does that look like? Please share in the comments below.

(Editor’s note: Brain-Work is hosted by the University of Saskatchewan and there is a problem with the comments that cannot be resolved. If you try to comment on this or any blog post and you get a “forbidden to comment” error message, please send your comment to virginia.wilson@usask.ca and I will post the comment on your behalf and alert the author. We apologize for this annoying problem.)

This article gives the views of the author and not necessarily the views the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

The Beauty of ORCIDs

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by Kristin Hoffmann, University of Western Ontario

A few months ago, I published an article that Jane Schmidt had written for the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship special issue on diversity (I am one of CJAL’s co-editors). Before I knew it, Jane had tweeted about her article’s publication. I was surprised; had she been constantly refreshing the journal’s web site? How had she found out about it so quickly?

I got my answer in a follow-up tweet:
Screenshot of a tweet from Jane Schmidt that says “Also, shout out to @ORCID_Org for notifying me that it was published! Shazam!”

And that, librarian-authors, is the beauty of ORCID:

• When you have an ORCID ID,
• and you give it to a journal you are publishing with,*
• and the journal registers DOIs for the articles it publishes (and many journals do),

then, when the journal publishes your article,
• the DOI registration sends the information about your ORCID to CrossRef,
• and CrossRef sends information to ORCID about your new article,
• and ORCID lets you know that it has added a new publication to your profile.

This all happens seamlessly. It’s a great example of technologies talking to each other and making our researching and authoring lives easier.

As an editor, it was gratifying to see an author promote her publication online so soon after it was published. I’ve also used my ORCID ID as an author, and getting the notification from ORCID that my publication was added to my profile was a good ego boost—even an automated email can be affirming.

Other benefits of an ORCID profile include:
• Pulling together publications with different names or name variants (e.g., initials, full first names, different last names)
• Helping you keep your CV up to date
• Communicating information to and from funding agencies, if you apply for grants
• Helping you demonstrate the attention and reach of your publications, by connecting ORCID with tools such as ImpactStory

If you don’t have an ORCID ID, take 30 seconds to sign up for one at the ORCID site, https://orcid.org/.

And take another ten minutes or so to add your previous publications to your profile:

Then include your ORCID ID with the next article you submit, and when your article is published, you too can have a Shazam! moment and experience the beauty of ORCID.

*Technically, in this case, I searched for Jane’s ORCID ID and added it to her article’s metadata before I published the article.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.