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
Good to see it working on your blog 馃檪
Test comment for #orcid12 codefest
Michael: You (not unreasonably) entered “http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4221-7956” instead of “0000-0003-4221-7956”. We’ll trap that case in a future update.
We’ve now added a 19-character limit (for sixteen digits plus three hyphens) and we display an example.
Watching your demo at UIC. It looks great.
Nice one. I’ve submitted a pull request to the GitHub repo to refactor the plugin for easier installation, and there’s a few little things I’ll either do pull requests on, or open issues.
P.s. I now have an ORCID!
Now installing for anyone at Occam’s Typewriter to use!
Cool idea. One thing I’ve learned about WordPress plugins: it’s a great idea to get users from different major hosts to test it. One I wrote didn’t work at all on some platforms, I never found out until someone who had a 1and1 hosted WordPress site emailed me and told me she was getting PHP errors.
Hi Andy
Strange bug report for you. Over at http://occamstypewriter.org/ we syndicate the individual blogs’ feeds into the main page. While the ORCID plugin is active we get a duplication of the trail text. When it’s inactive everything works normally. We’re using FeedWordPress to syndicate, but I can’t actually remember how I configured the size of the posts it displays, so it might be a bit tricky to troubleshoot.
Thanks, rpg,
We’re discussing this on GitHub. It may be a conflict between plugins.
I wonder if we can add ORCID display for signed-in commenters like, er, me? I think that’ll be tricky…
This particular one is fixed already Andy 馃檪 if you visit the GitHub Page there a download zip button on the right hand side. Upload that using Plugins > Add New after deleting the original version from your site.
So it is – thank you. I’ll update this post accordingly.
I’ve just released a new version where everything sits neatly inside a class to keep this plugin more maintainable 馃檪
Thank you, Roy.
Just a note that we’re now at version 0.5
Looks great; Well done!
Will there be any plans in the future for a direct ORCID plugin for other pages (e.g. about.me)?
Thanks for the kind words, Juergen!
Please can you clarify; do you mean for the “about me” page on a WordPress site, or on the about.me website?
Dear Andy, sorry for the confusion.
I originally meant the latter: In ‘about.me/xxx’ profiles (e.g. http://about.me/jwastl ) there is a choice of apps/links (e.g. linked in, twitter, instagram, facebook, github, to name a few) and I thought it would be nice to have ORCID next to the Google Scholar link…
I just created a wordpress account for myself and could see a value of ORCID in the ‘about me’ section in there too. There is a number of researchers out there that blog and with ORCID on the rise they could showcase their Scholary output by this means in an elegant fashion too….
Thanks for clarifying, Juergen. You can reach out to About.me on Twitter (@aboutdotme) and ask them to add an ORCID parameter, as I have just done. Until they do, you can add ORCID to your list of URLs on your About.me profile, as I have done on mine.
Thanks for your help! Should have seen the ‘link’ facility for ORCID myself..
Congratulations on the plugin. Am I right that you are not using OAuth? Typing in a ORCID in a text field has disadvantages, e.g. it is easy to miss typos.
It would be good to add the plugin to the WordPress plugins directory, if you haven’t done so already. This makes discovery and installation much easier.
I’m happy to help
Thank you, Martin.
Both of your suggestions are on our roadmap. We do have validation, so we should catch typos, but avoiding them (and avoiding unnecessary typing altogether) will be better.
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Nice work!
This has been quiet since 2014. No updates?
Sadly not – any offers?
Don’t have much time unfortunately, but can help you if you want to work on it together?
Thank you; I’m no coder, but a happy to do testing, etc.
Great to see this!