Identity Is Everything

Publishers are understandably concerned about piracy, but the STM/NISO initiative RA21 “to align and simplify pathways to subscribed content across participating scientific platforms” has scoped its problem the wrong way. Simply put: It’s not about security. It’s about identity. Every individual should be in control of their own identity. Can RA21 realize its potential to serve the broader interests of scientists and academia, not just the understandable objectives of publishers and vendors?

PIDapalooza – Revenge of the Nerds

PIDapalooza, the first ever festival of persistent identifiers, set out not only to bring together the creators and users of PIDs, but also to make PIDs cool. Did it succeed? Find out in this report on the event from Alice Meadows and Phill Jones

Integrate to Innovate: Using Standards to Push Content Forward

While many of the traditional publishing tasks remain intact, new tasks that are much more technical in nature have changed the skill sets required to be scholarly publishers. As new and developing standards and services such as Funder Identification, ORCID, CHORUS, and more come online, publishers and their vendors must integrate when they would rather innovate. The trick is in realizing where integration allows more innovation.

All about ORCID

Last week ORCID published the results of its first major survey. Around 6,000 respondents globally – ORCID record holders and non record holders – provided feedback on their perceptions and understanding of ORCID. Find out what they said…

Why Are Publishers and Editors Wasting Time Formatting Citations?

The majority of time spent in editing and formatting citations in the publication process is time wasted. We now have in place nearly all the components to use persistent identifiers, linked metadata, and style sheets to improve how citations can be structured and processed. Using these tools can significantly improve the accuracy of references and reduce the time editors spend on this production function. Even when automated, we bounce between linked metadata, then to text, then to metadata again.

An Interview with Amy Brand on a Proposed New Contributor Taxonomy Initiative

We’ve got DOIs (digital object identifiers) to help identify research articles, images, and other digital objects, and ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) to help disambiguate the authors of those objects. Now there’s a new initiative to create a contributor taxonomy that identifies who’s done what in the creation of published research – find out more in our interview with Amy Brand, one of the brains behind the concept.