Is there any non-commercial alternative to ResearcherID?

Question

Identifying uniquely a researcher as author of a publication is important. There is a commercial effort to create researcher ID for every researcher. It is not likely to succeed if it is not multiple publisher effort. Something like DOI and CrossRef.

Is there truly non-commercial alternative emerging?

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 24 '12 at 21:37

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ORCID is supposed to take care of that and it seems to gain significant traction. According to this presentation, it should be launched in fall this year (2012). However, I am not sure whether it falls under your definition of "non-commercial".

I am myself very curious about it, my hopes are that finally it will take care of disambiguation of names like "John Smith" - for me e.g., Web of Science database is practically unusable as it shows several thousands of papers for my name :-|.

answered Aug 24 '12 at 21:37

walkmanyi

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Curiously, I checked it yesterday a few hours before this question appeared. Their business model looks good to me: 1) non-for-profit organization owns the data 2) privacy settings available to the researcher 3) everyone gets to query individual data online 4) paid sponsors get bulk access via an API 5) all code is open source. – Federico Poloni Aug 25 '12 at 06:10
How does ORCID compare to ResearcherID? – bobthejoe Nov 21 '12 at 20:08
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@bobthejoe: Thomson Reuters (the company behind ResearcherID) is a part of the consortium behind ORCID. They provide even integration with ResearcherID, as well as Scopus does. See also http://about.orcid.org/faq-page#n81. – walkmanyi Nov 21 '12 at 20:39
By the way, ORCID is not non-commercial. For instance, they sell API data access for $5000 and up. – Federico Poloni May 19 '16 at 08:27
@FedericoPoloni that's the fee for membership of the consortium, which comes with API access. I'm not sure I'd class it as "commercial" as a result. – Andrew is gone May 19 '16 at 12:25
@Andrew "Commercial" is not well defined (as the people at Creative Commons know well), but API access seems to be the main perk of becoming a member: on that page they write that members can "submit nominations" for the board, but as far as I understand they have no voting rights, for instance. So in my personal view that counts as selling data access disguised as membership, and it is definitely a commercial activity. – Federico Poloni May 20 '16 at 12:25

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 25 '12 at 16:56

For those of us in particle physics and related fields inSPIRE's HepNames¹ service assigns a unique ID to each researcher (though they are rarely used outside of the database) and keeps track of their professional history, publications, citations and so on. My inSPIRE record is not really that inspiring, but there it is.

¹ The successor project to the original SPIRES; inSPIRE also supports a rich search operation across affiliations, publications, names, and other data.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 19 '16 at 16:14

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Wikidata seems to build up a system where researchers who write articles that are citable by Wikipedia get unique IDs.

answered May 19 '16 at 16:14

Christian

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Is there any non-commercial alternative to ResearcherID?

3 Answers3

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