Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

My name is displayed pretty prominently on this blog, but it is not
always easy to find out who the real person is behind many a blog. In
science, I am troubled by such anonymity. Well, a new era is about to
hit us. When you come across an Internet resource, or an opinion/review
of some scientific topic, I argue here that you should immediately ask:
"what is its provenance?"

In the 350 year history of scientific
dissemination\[cite\]10.1098/rstl.1665.0001\[/cite\], provenance has
almost always been provided by publishers. Arguably, that was their most
important role (and arranging anonymous peer review). Not that they ever
met with their authors or always established that a real person or a
real group actually existed! But with the explosion of *vanity
publication* and a host of horror stories about articles for sale to
authors keen to have a publication to their name, perhaps the role of
provenance needs rethinking.

ORCiD is a project that seems to be gaining serious momentum in
achieving a mechanism for disambiguation and provenance of researchers.
Thus [Brian
Kelly](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/01/30/why-every-researcher-should-sign-up-for-their-orcid-id/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ImpactOfSocialSciences+%28Impact+of+Social+Sciences%29http://){target="_blank"}
(who has played an important role in the modern internet in the UK since
1993 or earlier) encourages all researchers to sign up (although I
cannot help noting, rather cheekily, that he does not add his own ORCiD
as provenance for his blog).
[ResearcherID](http://wokinfo.com/researcherid/){target="_blank"} was in
fact an earlier organisation to offer such a service, but it is run by a
commercial publisher and it is hosted at a
"[.com](http://www.researcherid.com/){target="_blank"}". ORCiD at least
claims to be an open (.org)anisation, and carries an [open source
license](http://orcid.org/open-source-license){target="_blank"}. It
seems that some UK Universities (home to some researchers) have decided
to sign up to ORCiD and most I suspect are planning to deploy these
resources amongst their researchers, and quite possibly their students
as well (postgraduate initially, maybe even undergraduate eventually).

I jumped the gun somewhat, getting mine more than a year ago. Better the
devil you know, etc etc! It is
[orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"}.
What happened next? Well, I publish data@Figshare, who themselves signed
up to be an early member of ORCiD. This gives them access to the API
(application programmer interface), and so by supplying my ORCiD to
Figshare, I can gain access by proxy to the ORCiD features on offer. The
most immediate impact is that ORCiD lists all the data-objects I have
published at Figshare, thus establishing a trust between them and my
ORCiD identity. Mind you, no-one at ORCiD has ever met me, or checked on
who I am. I think that task is going to be delegated eventually to
*e.g.* my university (I am not absolutely certain how the linkage
between my ORCiD and my employer, who clearly know me since they pay my
salary, will be formalised). Because my employer has also now become an
ORCiD member, we will be adding ORCiD API access to our own
SPECTRa-DSpace data repository shortly, so that the data held there will
also be added to my ORCiD lists.

And as the major journal publishers start to do the same, a formal
linkage between my identity (perhaps as verified by my employer),
journal-published articles (narratives) and my data publications (*via*
the identifiers known as DOIs) will come into being.

How, you might reasonably ask, is this in the least useful? In truth, I
am not sure anyone really knows exactly where this is heading. For
example, [impactstory.org/about](http://impactstory.org/about) is one
*added value* site which attempts to gather *altmetrics* about the
impact your research is having. But hey, the although the preceding link
tells you who founded this organisation, you do not get the kind of
provenance I am describing above; none of the founders cite their
ORCiDs! You do get their @Twitter accounts though; I wonder what that
tells us about the modern interpretation of provenance? Well, my impact
can be seen [here](https://impactstory.org/Rzepa){target="_blank"}; in
truth it's not quite the impact I imagined my scientific career was
having, but I suppose this is early days. What I am pleased to tell you
is that ImpactStory does tell you not only about the impact articles I
have published has had, but also the data. Two data sets are described
as both *discussed* and *highly viewed*. Although as usual, you do not
get to learn **why** the data is being discussed!

Where next? Well, to go back to the start of this post; blogs. It would
be nice to formally link this blog to my ORCiD ID (this is not done
simply by quoting it here, but *via* the ORCiD API). If/when I work out
how to do this, I will no doubt post the event!

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


My name is displayed pretty prominently on this blog, but it is not always easy to find out who the real person is behind many a blog. In science, I am troubled by such anonymity.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Disambiguation/provenance of claimed scientific opinion and research.