Category Archives: ORCID

Public Keys in ORCID Profiles

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My friend Terence Eden is knowledgeable (and blogs wittily and accessibly) about IT security issues. He’s also a vociferous advocate of PGP, a computer program for the encryption and decryption of data and communications. At my suggestion, he just registered for an ORCID iD (it’s 0000-0002-9265-9069), and the first thing he did was to include a link to his PGP Public key in his ORCID profile.

ORCID Profile for Terence Eden

That’s the first time I’ve seen this done.

Perhaps more people should include links to public keys in their ORCID profiles? Maybe ORCID could consider a separate parameter for this (or is the “websites” section of the profile adequate)? What do you think?

But whatever you do, when you link to your PGP public key from your ORCID profile, don’t use Bit.ly!

Note: I’m Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID. An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifier is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors and content contributors — like an ISBN, but for people.

Matching ORCID and other authority control identifiers in Wikidata BEACON

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Further to my previous post on finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia, Magnus Manske has released another useful gadget. “Wikidata BEACON” is a new tool that matches individuals’ (or other subjects’) entries in two different authority control systems. One of these, of course, can be ORCID.

For example to find people who are listed in Wikidata, and have an ORCID identifier recorded there, and who also have, say, a VIAF identifier, or a MusicBrainz artist profile, choose one of those properties, then the other, from the two drop down menus, then select “Get BEACON data”.

screenshot

Screenshot of Beacon, with ORCID and VIAF identifiers selected.

The result is returned as a pipe (“|“)-separated list, with the middle of the three columns being the Wikidata ID (in the format “Qnnn“) of the item concerned. (For the technically inclined, the format is BEACON, used to enable third party data re-users to automate the conversion of identifier values into web links. You can see the part-URLs, to which the values must be appended, at the head of the results page, labelled #PREFIX and #TARGET)

So, Bill Thompson, for instance, appears as:

4426461|Q4911143|0000-0003-4402-5296

showing respectively, his VIAF (4426461), Wikidata (Q4911143), and ORCID (0000-0003-4402-5296) identifiers

A query can also be made in the form of a URL, for example this one:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=496&source=214

in which “496” is from Wikidata’s code for an ORCID identifier and “214” for a VIAF identifier.

Another example is:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=661&source=373

which shows the identifiers of chemicals in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ChemSpider database and the matching Wikimedia Commons categories.

Similarly:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=827&source=345

matches the BBC and Internet Movie Database (IMDb) identifiers of television programmes.

Beacon is a good illustration of the way in which Wikidata has become a hub linking disparate datasets about people, and other things; as described by Andrew Gray in “Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?“.

Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia

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As you may know, I’m was appointed Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID in June this year.

I’ve previously written a guide to using ORCID identifiers in Wikipedia.

A new tool, ‘Resolver‘, by my friend Magnus Manske, who has awesome coding skills, and is generous with them, allows you to find whether a particular ORCID identifier is used in (and thus in one or more Wikipedia projects, in any language).

By entering the property “P496” (the Wikidata property for an ORCID ID) and the ORCID ID value (the short form, e.g. “0000-0003-4402-5296”, not the full identifier, “http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4402-5296”) into Resolver, the relevant Wikidata page, if any, is retuned. At the foot of that page are links to Wikipedia articles (again, if any).

Resolver screenshot

An ORCID identifier query in Resolver

Alternatively, you may compile a URL in the format https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P496&value=0000-0003-4402-5296 – which will automagically redirect.

Note that this works for articles, but not identifiers used on Wikipedia editors’ user pages, which have no Wikidata equivalent.

Resolver works with other unique identifiers, too, such as VIAF, or BBC Your Paintings artist identifiers, and many more. If you want to know why that’s important, see Andrew Gray’s post, “Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?“. Resolver is not just for people, though. It will also resolve unique identifiers for other types of subjects, such as BBC programme IDs or ChemSpider IDs for chemical compounds.

Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry

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I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted the position of Wikimedian in Residence with the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), a learned society and professional body whose roots go back to 1841 (see ).

Over the next year, starting 22 September, I will be helping my new RSC colleagues, and the Society’s members, to understand Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to contribute to making knowledge of chemistry, and related subjects, more freely available. The job is titled “WikiMedian”, because as well as WikiPedia, it covers those other projects, which are run by the Wikimedia community.

a room full of people at computers

Trainees hard at work at a previous RSC editathon, in
Burlington House’s library, at which I volunteered as a trainer.

This follows on from my previous Wikipedia residences with Wildscreen (on their ARKive project), with Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service, at the New Art Gallery Walsall, and with Lancashire County Council’s Museum Service (at their Queen Street Mill), plus shorter projects with a number of other institutions (including West Midlands Police, The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Black Country Museum, and more). I’ll continue to be Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID. The RSC have already integrated ORCID into their publishing workflow and the two organisations obviously share interests in research and academic publishing.

I’ll be working part time, partly from home, and at the RSC’s Cambridge base one day per week, plus travelling around the UK to various events. I’ll also enjoy spending some days at their palatial London HQ, at Burlington House. My work days will vary to suit the requirements of the post, and my other commitments.

The rest of the time, I’ll still be available, as a freelancer, for other work, not least relating to Wikipedia, and facilitating open space events (for example, I’m MCing GalleryCamp on 23 September). Do drop me a line if you think I can help you with that, or if you have an interest in my RSC work, or if you want to meet socially, after work, in Cambridge.

ORCID plugin for WordPress

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ORCID, the “Open Research Contributor ID”, is an identifier for contributors to academic papers, journals, and other publications. It’s the equivalent, for such people, of an ISBN for a book or a DOI for a paper. ORCID is an open data project, run by a not-for-profit foundation.

I’ve been working with ORCID for over a year, on their “works metadata working group“, as an outreach ambassador, and integrating ORCID into Wikipedia and Wikidata (link is a PDF).

I’m currently at the ORCID outreach event at the University of Illinois in Chicago, USA, and participating in the codefest (a hackathon by another name).

I came up with the idea for a plugin for WordPress, which would allow authors to add their ORCID identifier to their profile, and which would allow users to add their ORCIDs to comments.

Roy Boverhof (kindly sponsored by Elsevier) has kindly coded it (it’s his first WordPress plugin!); I’ve installed it; and used it on this post; so you can see my ORCID “0000-0001-5882-6823”) above, and Roy’s in his comment.

If you have an ORCID, please leave a comment here, and include it in the field provided.

The plugin is very much in beta mode (its not yet tested in multiple browsers, for instance; and we need to add documentation and additional functionality such as check-digit validation), but you can get it from Roy’s GitHub repository (there’s a “download zip” button on the right hand side, in the default view) and install it on any self-hosted WordPress installation using Plugins > Add New. (If upgrading from a previous version, please delete the original first.)

Your feedback will be welcome, in comments below, as will code contributions at GitHub.

Thanks, Roy!

Update, 2014-05-22: There were prizes for the best product; all of them were great, but we came second!

Update, 2014-05-28: New version, with various improvements. Please delete the old version before installing the new one, per the above (revised) instructions.

Update, 2014-05-28b: And again! Now at version 0.5