EAGER-ORCID: Investigating ORCID as an accelerator of science of science policy

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The ability to attribute the results of scholarship to individual scholars is a fundamental enabler of a rigorous and data-driven science of science policy; it enables the automated linkage of research inputs to research outputs in an accurate and consistent manner. The research explores whether a new researcher identification and profile system can provide the basis for an automated attribution system.The goals are to refine and deploy a profile system by working with a small number of US research institutions and the federal government to explore how this system works in practice when used to acquire and provide access to information about US researchers. This research is suitable for the EAGER program because it is simultaneously high risk (there are many ways in which a researcher identity system can fail, including technical, institutional, and sociological) and high reward (it can fundamentally change the way in which scientific activity is documented).Intellectual Merit: The attribution problem is extremely complex. There are technical challenges such as how to generate unique researcher identifiers, match those identifiers with research outputs such as publications and patents and maintain large numbers of researcher profiles in a reliable and efficient manner. There are human computer interface issues, such as privacy concerns and user-friendly claiming mechanisms. There are also substantive social issues such as incentivizing and rewarding participation as well as achieving network effects.Broader impacts: The researcher identifier and profile system to be developed and evaluated in this project has benefits well beyond science policy. Researcher profiles can be used to streamline grant application, publication manuscript, and employment application processes. Researchers could use the approach to include all their contributions to the scholarly record, such as peer review, data curation, and software development. By making data about research and researchers more visible, profiles can also help researchers locate potential collaborators and develop networks. Research institutions can use such profiles to help them to evaluate the research outputs associated with specific research teams, departments, and/or institutions, and to support the job recruitment process. In all cases, profiles will enable the identification of strong areas of research and to track the publications of their faculty. Scholarly societies could use profiles to enhance their public member profiles. Publishers could use profiles to track authors and reviewers in their journal submission systems, with the ability to screen effectively for conflicts of interest. Reliable linkage among articles by the same authors and their collaborators could help promote the discovery of related scholarly works.