Your online scholarly identity...why is it important?

There are so many tools out there now to help researchers build their online identity – ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the list goes on. But what do we mean by ‘online identity’ and why is it so important to researchers? (A side question could also be why we, as librarians, care about this when obviously, many researchers don’t? But that is another story altogether).

So, what do we mean by online identity. Everyone has an online identity if you have had anything to do with the internet. Type your name into Google and most people will get at least one hit on their name with some people getting many hits. But why is this important? Your online identity is what people who don’t know you (but know about you) search for – prospective employers, colleagues, rivals, people you have just met at a conference. From a professional viewpoint, it is important that these people find your information, and most importantly, find accurate information easily.

Maintaining and curating your professional identity is the key to achieving this. But in a minefield of options which ones do you choose?

You have probably been using products that you have either been using in a previous life, or that your colleagues are already using. However, no matter which product (or products) you use, it is critical that these be kept up to date. There is nothing worse that searching and finding someone’s profile only to find that the most recent publication listed is from four years ago, or where they say they work is clearly not the case.

Where I work, we have three that we recommend that researchers keep up to date – ORCID, Google Scholar profile and of course, the institutional repository.

[Note: for the purpose of this I am discounting social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – all of which are important in disseminating information about yourself and your works.]

ORCID has quickly risen to be a universal identifier for scholarly outputs, and, why wouldn’t it? It is free to use, independent, and has a fantastic developing team behind it. Being a truly independent identifier also means that it easily integrates with external systems (unless you work where I do, where nothing really seems to integrate with anything else – but that is a whole other issue). With ORCID you can upload your outputs, or connect to another data source (such as Scopus or Research Data Australia) and any of your works listed in these data sources will be imported into your profile. You can add grant information, education and work details, as well as provide links to other online profiles that you maintain. By sharing your ORCID iD URL with colleagues you can provide a quick, one-stop-shop to all professional information about yourself.

The second online profile we recommend curating is a Google Scholar My Citations Profile. Google Scholar is big….not as big as Google, but in academic circles it is still pretty awesome. Having a Google Scholar profile set up is one key way for other people to find your research. Of course, it relies on your publications being indexed and available in Google, although there is the option of manually adding selected metadata about those that aren’t in Google. A word of warning – it is very easy to accidently add publications that aren’t yours to your profile, or for someone else to add your publications to their profile. Careful checking and periodic searches of your works may be advisable.

Which brings us to the old favourite, the institutional repository. Love it or hate it, it is here to stay and likely tied into your institutions reporting requirements. So, love it or hate it, you may be required to use it. I love our institutional repository, even the funny quirks that make it frustrating to work with, but it serves a purpose and a function in our academic community. And it is easy for our researchers. All they need to do is send in the metadata of their recent publications and the Research Collections team does the rest! It is a way for researchers to archive their outputs, preserve them, make them open access, and provides a nice link that they can send out to colleagues. It is also indexed by Google, so readily discoverable for anyone searching for your publications. I can’t speak highly enough for institutional repositories around the world – they are by far the best way to promote your research.

This then leaves us with the ‘badies’ of the online scholarly identity world – ResearchGate and Adademia.edu. I must admit that each of these have their place in the scholarly identity world, and all three of them are wildly popular in various disciplines. My reasons for disliking them are purely selfish – they are a rival to our institutional repository. And in this day and age where everyone is time poor, why invest your energies in keeping these up to date as well as the other critical profiles. ResearchGate and Academica.edu are both proprietary products that could turn off at any time. They have no preservation strategy and no commitment to keeping your work safe. If you wish to use them to disseminate your works, then please, please, please do so as an additional method to those listed above.



So now that you have all methods for people to find information about you and your works, what do you do? The key is to spend some time each week, month, couple of months (depending on your frequency of publication) updating them. As stated above, there is nothing worse than colleagues or other interested people finding an out of date profile. By keeping these updated, you are presenting your best self to those that want to find you.

Notes from CAUL Repository Community Day 2017

The annual CAUL Repository Community Day was held last Monday as a satellite event alongside the Open Repositories 2017 conference in Brisbane.  It was an excellent exchange of ideas and knowledge (as always) with lots of institutions doing many wonderful things in their institutional repository space.

Program: here 

Kathleen Shearer (COAR) started the day with a wonderful talk about COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and the problem with the current scholarly publishing system.  As library journal subscriptions continue to rise, Kathleen posed the question that if we are collecting published content and putting it into our repositories, are we then just perpetuating a flawed system?  In addition, the need researchers feel to be published in "luxury" journals with high impact factors is forcing some researchers to work in 'trendy' areas, rather than doing the more important less glamorous work that needs to be done.  Kathleen used the example of the recent Zika virus outbreak.  Prior to the outbreak those researching in this area had problems getting their articles published in top journals.  However as soon as the virus made it to the US, it became a 'trendy' topic and suddenly researchers could publish anywhere.  This model of selective, elitist journal publishing is something that we need to move away from, although in today's academic climate of performance measurement (both internally in our institutions, and externally by the government) being based on citation rates and visibility in a particular subscription database, it will be a long time before we change.

COAR is also investigating the so-called 'next generation' repositories, and what such a repository may look like. As new technologies and services are developed, we need to strive to continue to make our repositories relevant.  This is something that I feel really strongly about.  The answer to this, according to Kathleen, is to strengthen and add value to our repository networks.  Repositories are critical to our future visions of libraries and serve two roles: to showcase and provide access to the scholarly record of our own institutions; and as nodes in a global knowledge commons.  To support this global nature of repositories, COAR launched the Aligning Repository Networks International Accord on 8th May 2017.  A shared vision of this strategic coordination will facilitate data exchange such as cross regional harvesting between networks and repositories.  The problem is that Australia doesn't have a formal 'repository network', something that the Australasian Repository Working Group (ARWG) is examining. Australia also lacks a national aggregator to exchange information with international aggregators such as OpenAIRE.

Another shared vision of the Accord is interoperability - common vocabularies and metadata guidelines.  This is also a focus of the ARWG, and is seen as a core feature of repositories.  There are however many challenges in improving interoperability with so many disparate systems and 'business-purposes' for our repositories.  The ARWP sees interoperability requiring collaboration and a common understanding between repositories in Australia, as well as globally.  Part of this common understanding is providing a consistent approach to metadata standards and vocabularies   The NISO 'free_to_read' and 'licence_ref' tags are a beginning as this will help to identify open access content across systems.  University of New England and Deakin University are the pioneers in this area, having implemented these tags in their institutional repositories already.  

In so much as we have a national aggregator, TROVE is especially important to Australian repositories in that it harvests content into a single database.  Due to the number of disparate systems in Australia, there is much variation of the quality of the data going into TROVE, with a large variety of metadata schemas and formats.  Julia Hickie from TROVE spoke about the sort of data that is going into TROVE from our repositories.  Identifiers, in particular, have proliferated in the last five years.  In spite of this, ORCIDs are nearly invisible in the TROVE data, accounting for only about 1% of harvested records.  This indicates that very few repositories are actually recording the ORCID identifier in their metadata records.  Having said this, there are now over 17,000 ORCIDs in TROVE, up from 2000 two years ago.  In order to improve the quality of the data in TROVE, Julia advised that it is a important to do a 'health check' on your repository data that is being harvested by TROVE every now and then, and particularly if you change something or move to a new system.  Things to look at are:

• make sure the repository URL is in a dc:identifier
• author ORCIDS are URLs in dc:relation
• ARC/NHMRC grant identifiers as a URL in dc:relation, and in the format http://dx.doi.org/[doi]
• DOIs are URLS in dc:relation or dc:identifier
• open access indicator uses free_to_read
• Creative Commons licence information in full URL form in dc:rights or ali:licence_ref
• rights statements are in full URL form in dc:rights or ali:licence_ref.

Check the OAI-PMH feed yourself to ensure that it is working correctly. 

There are a number of institutions doing fantastic things with their repositories.  Some of these presented on the day include:

• Robin Burgess from the University of Sydney spoke about collecting non-traditional research outputs (NTROs) and bridging the gap between these outputs and traditional outputs, which had previously been kept in separate repositories.  Consultation with academics showed that a repository that would suit these "defiant objects", or the "rule breakers", had to have a visually rich interface, with many academics already having these outputs showcased on personal websites.  The system had to be able to display these outputs along with the ephemeral information that accompanied them.

• Janice Chan from Curtin University reported on their recent move to Dspace using an external vendor, Atmire.  They took the opportunity during the migration to change some work practices, including reducing the organisational structure in the system from many faculties to just two groups (research papers and theses, although they plan to add a third for grey literature) and to improve their metadata standards with the addition of funder and rights fields.

• Kate Croker from University of Western Australia talked about their Repository Project, whereby they enriched their Pure repository with grant data, researcher profiles, publication collections, and the like.   The project provided scope for extensive collaboration between stakeholders and external departments, strengthening the relationship in the process.  Through this collaboration, a shared vision for the repository was produced which has helped to shape the direction, as well as build support, for the repository.  [Kate also has presented this at ALIA Online - paper and presentation available here]

• Bernadette Houghton from Deakin University spoke on using Omeka software for digital collections.  She especially mentioned some recommendations surrounding the use of third party plugins versus those available on Omeka.org.  

Bernedette Houghton also spoke about self assessment for repositories against ISO 16363 which Deakin University completed in 2013.  This assesses features such as governance, technical infrastructure, security and preservation.  In completing the project Deakin University looked at the existing literature, performed the self assessment, and addressed the areas of improvement.  Bernedette provided a list of recommendations for anyone wanting to do a repository self assessment, including:

• choose a tool (it doesn't have to be ISO 13636)
• review the criteria from the start
• understand ISO 13636's conceptual nature (based on OAIS)
• preference local knowledge over ISO suggested documentation
• allocate resources to address areas of improvement.

[Note: I first heard about this at iPRES 2014, and have been wanting to do this for our repository ever since, however I know how dismally ours would fail so haven't had the nerve until we move to a new system.  More from Bernedette can be found here  http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2015-houghton]

The day finished up with a general discussion on how institutions are dealing/coping with ERA and the absence of publications for HERDC (and if anything had taken it's place).  Most (all?) institutions are still collecting publications on an annual basis, whether as ERA prepation, internal reporting, KPI's, or for "just-in-case" the government changes it's mind about HERDC.  There have also been many institutions where the responsibility for publication collection has shifted from the research office to the library.  

There was some discussion of the Engagment and Impact Assessment and how institutions went about completing this.  Mary-Anne Marrington from University of Queensland reported on their method.  

[Note: Our Office of Research decided not to participate in the pilot (held in 2017), so I can't comment on our process.]

The definition of "open access" for ERA (and more generally), in particular the difference between open access and free access, and which was correct for ERA, produced some lively debate.  Different institutions have different definitions, and would require some clear guidelines.  The ARC Open Access Policy is due out soon (the draft has been out for some months), so hopefully, at least for ERA purposes, this will be much clearer.

There were others that presented, and their presentations were fantastic.  It is always good (although a bit deperssing) to hear what others are doing in this space.  I always leave with many good ideas that I would love to implement back at home, but as always, resourcing (staffing and money) are always a problem.  So, many of these ideas remain in limbo.   I think it would be good for the powers that be to take note of Kathleen Shearer's comment, "repositories are a technology and technologies change".  We need to continue to strive to make our repositories relevant in this changing landscape, and continue to value add services in either the repository layer or in the network layer above.

Easy as 1, 2, 3...

I know what I am interested in, and I know what I am passionate about, but seldom do these coincide with things that others are interested in and passionate about.  Except ORCID.

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) is something that seems to resonate with a whole bunch of people, from hard core researchers to administrators and librarians.  For those that are saying "but what do flowers have to do with researchers?", ORCID is a way to disambiguate researchers, especially those with similar sounding names.  By giving each researcher a unique number, they can then go and 'tag' their research publications, data, grants, and many other research outputs as theirs.  It is like the grand-daddy of researcher identifiers.  And it has landed in a big way.

However, I get the feeling that ORCID is more popular with research administrators than with the researchers themselves.  There are a multitude of reasons why research institutions can benefit from ORCID (streamlining processes, reporting on research undertaken,identifying research resulting from grants awarded to staff, etc), but the benefits to researchers are not as obvious.  Sure, being about to differentiate between the various "Tim Smiths" that work at the institution would be nice, but what else?  What is there that drives the researcher to maintain their ORCID profile?

I recently read an article by The Research Whisperer that sums this up nicely, and I created a sketch note about it.  And I must say, speaking as someone that rarely gets a like or retweet on Twitter, this has gone galactic!  It has definitely hit a chord with many people who work either in research or around research.  It is a credit to the author of the article (Jonathan O'Donnell) for writing such a wonderful piece.

Some of the comments I have received via Twitter include:

@BecOwen74, Just made my day. Thanks! (from @jod999)

 I love this summary of ORCID from the Research Whisperer. This image makes its uses very straighforward (from @Ashley_UQL)

Get your research & profile out there - for all academics, postdocs, PhD students.  Love the graphic! (from @LareenNewman) 

And to top it off, the author even included it in his blog post on The Research Whisperer!

How chuffed am I!!

So, without further ado, here is my sketch note.  I hope you enjoy.

Open Access in scholarly communication

Open Access (OA) has come along way since the idea was formalised in 2002 as the Budapest Open Access Initiative.  It has since become the catch call for scholarly communication, providing an ideal tool in the dissemination of research results and publications far and wide.

Since it's inception, there are many models of implementing OA - gold, hybrid, delayed and green.  Green OA is the preferred, at least from this Repository Manager's point of view, however I fully appreciate that some researchers do not want a less than perfect version of their work out on display to the world.  This is where the Gold/Hybrid/Delayed route comes into play - still all very legitimate OA options.

No matter which OA method is chosen, the most important thing is that research results are made available to anyone that is interested, regardless of access to subscription library databases, and that universities and other research institutions recognise the importance in providing the infrastructure and the means to make this research accessible.

(Based on the article by Mohammad Reza Ghane (2014) Open Access Policy. International Journal of Information Science and Management)

Impact of research on society

As I experiment in the sketch noting world, I use as my test topic an excellent article from academics at Charles Stuart University.

Societal impact has come under intense discussion lately in Australia as the Government prepares to trial an Assessment and Impact Framework from 2018, with a pilot to be run in 2017.  This will be the first time that institutions nationwide will be involved in an assessment of this nature, which is touted to be along the lines of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF).

But what is societal impact?  According to the Australian Research Council (ARC), impact is

"the demonstrable contribution that research makes to the economy, society, culture, national security, public policy or service, health, the environment, or quality of life, beyond contributions to academia" (ARC Research Impact Principles and Framework).

This has started many conversations by worried university administrators as to how such impact can be measured.

This is where this article, and my naive efforts at sketch noting, helps us to understand.  Bracing for Impact: The role of information science in supporting societal impact, by Lisa Given, Wade Kelly and Rebekah Willson, was presented at the ASIST 2015 Annual Meeting held in the United States.

Researcher identifiers

Researcher identifiers.....these unique sets of characters that identify a particular researcher as themselves, removing any ambiguity with other researchers of a similar name, are so important to the career of a researcher.  Not only the researcher though, but also the institution that needs to report on many different metrics relating to research output.

For those that do not know what a researcher identifier is or what the advantages are, here is a quick rundown.

However I am constantly amazed at the lack of care factor that researchers show towards researcher identifiers.  Don't get me wrong, some researchers "get it" and appreciate the importance of these characters.  These are the ones that actively maintain their publications and add any missing ones.  I love these researchers.  But the other 90%....I just don't get it!  I don't understand why they do not invest in the process.

The problem with Scopus:
Scopus is slightly different from the rest in that it is a system generated number assigned by Elsevier.  When a publisher sends metadata to Scopus, a fancy algorithm tries to match the author based on name spelling, format and affiliation.  If there is insufficient evidence to match with an existing author in the system, Scopus will automatically create a new one.  You can see how it is very easy for authors to end up with multiple identifiers in Scopus.  We recently did a "data cleansing" exercise in Scopus to try to identify and de-dupe multiple Scopus identifiers.  I contacted each author to explain the situation and provided step by step instructions on what to do (I thought it was good that the author engages with the process so that they may then learn and keep on top of it themselves in the future).  The most I found was one author that had 13 different identifies!! When you think about how much their research impact metrics were diluted out by having publications spread over 13 different identifiers, the mind boggles.

So why do researchers just not care?  Is it that they are too busy, the process to complicated or do they just not understand the importance?  Or maybe they just don't even know about researcher identifiers - no one has told them?

At USC we are trying to address the lack of care-factor with regards to researcher identifiers.  A comprehensive online guide has been produced and is regularly updated (however the limitations of our website mean that it is not very discoverable).  The librarians, when talking to researchers about outputs and metrics mention it.  And we have even run a competition during our recent USC Research Week conference for a chance to win a $100 voucher for every researcher identifier reported to the Library.  Emails to new staff ask if they have any researcher identifiers (from which we can obtain publications metadata for entry into our institutional repository, the USC Research Bank).

During the recent USC Research Week conference, the Library had a display encouraging researchers to think about their online research profile and what they can do to improve it.  One of the most contentious posters was a "Top 10 @ USC" which listed the top 10 authors with, amongst other things, citations in Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.  The bottom line is that if a researcher doesn't have a researcher identifier or has a poorly managed researcher identifier then their publications will not be able to be measured using conventional recognised metrics.

Perhaps an addendum to the Top 10 @ USC poster is to put "We really struggled to find you because you didn't have a researcher identifier".

eResearch Australasia 2015

Last week I attended what is one of the best conferences of the year - eResearch Australasia, held in Brisbane.  It is always a very inspiring event and I always come back filled with ideas to put into practice at work.

This year was a bit different to previous years in that it had a more library/human capital focus.  Previous years have been heavy on the technology side which, while interesting, was often slightly over my head.  This year is different.

The main themes prevalent throughout the conference were:

• The importance of libraries and librarians for open data
• Linked open data, not just shared data
• Data as an institutional asset
• The connected researcher.

Next year is being held in Melbourne during October - only a year to implement all my ideas before the next round.