Personal names are neither unique nor permanent. You can write or transcribe them in different ways. You can get married and change your family name. You can even find colleagues in HEP with the same name, e.g. John Smith. What happens when the John Smith you are looking for writes a paper? How do you tell him apart from his namesakes and find his articles? And does that article written by J.C.Smith in 1993 on [Nuclear Physics Revolution], belong to your colleague John, or Jim C. from Stanford?  This is something INSPIRE has been working on for a long time. We introduced INSPIRE IDs to uniquely establish your identity in our HEPNames database and more recently Author Publication Profiles, such as J.Q.Physicist.1 to collect all your papers together. But this is only for HEP, what about the wider world? Publishers introduced their own identification systems, so you probably have noticed that you have ended up with many IDs that describe your academic publications and CVs. These disparate identifier systems suffer from only partial coverage of a researcher’s corpus and interoperability issues.ORCID to the rescue!

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-profit organization supported by a global community of organizational members, including research organizations, publishers, funders, professional associations, and other stakeholders in the research ecosystem which  has developed a unique researcher identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers. ORCID ID can hold a record of all your research activities, variants of your name, affiliations, etc. You can also use it for manuscript submissions to most of the major publishers.

It helps you centralize your information and sign your work unambiguously, no matter how your personal details, affiliations or field of work change. It is also an invaluable tool to track impact and grant credit to authors. It is a single identifier that follows you throughout your career. Having an ORCID ID gives your professional circle the ability to see your publications and your work experience. To sum up, ORCID can provide you a detailed professional record, something that can be a very useful tool for researchers that want to keep their publications and research in the spotlight. Moreover, some of the biggest research libraries as INSPIRE are collaborating with ORCID, to offer one unique and widely accepted ID.

How does ORCID work?

To begin with, an ORCID ID is a unique 16-digit code (e.g.0000-0002-5769-7094), given to you upon the registration of your ORCID account. After registering you can manage all your information from your profile page. You can add as many details as you want and set the level of privacy you desire for the information you enter (public, limited, or private).

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Fig 1: ORCID profile page

What makes ORCID special is its ability to synchronize content with other platforms and services. That means that you spend less time (re)entering data and have more time available to conduct research. At this time, well-known services collaborating with ORCID are Scopus, Nature, APS, Faculty of 1000. In case you are wondering what your publication page would look like in ORCID let’s have a look at a typical example in Fig. 2. You can also see that this person has connected  his ORCID with ResearcherID and Scopus:

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Fig 2: ORCID publication page

If you are interested in creating your own ORCID, just click here.

INSPIRE has been working on some exciting new features! Publications are leading to their respective authors  but with help from ORCID, INSPIRE is going to be sure about the author’s identity and the procedure to claim your own publications will become easier.

Keep an eye on the INSPIRE-HEP blog and twitter for our next blog post, to better understand ORCID’s significance and use for INSPIRE and INSPIRE Labs!

 

 

As you might have read in our previous blog post, the new INSPIRE Labs website is the place where we will deploy and let you test new features.

Let us show you one of our new features: check out the Suggestion Forms on Labs!

Do you know about any publication (articles, proceedings, thesis) that is not on INSPIRE but could be an interesting addition? You can help us by letting us know about it via our new suggestion form. We will be happy to review it and include the content as soon as possible if it falls within our collection policy.

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Fig 1: Submit publications automatically

To make it simple, we included an automatic import tool (Fig. 1). If you enter an arXiv number and/or a DOI to the form, INSPIRE Labs will automatically pre-fill as much publication information as possible.

You can also fill out or complete it manually (Fig. 2). Only a few fields are mandatory, but the more information you provide us, the more useful it would be for the readers. It is particularly important that the Author fields contain all the co-authors who wrote the publication, with each name in a separate input field, one on each line.

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Fig 2: Submit publications manually

All the suggestions received will be reviewed by our team manually, to verify the content and complete the information following INSPIRE standards. This procedure can take a few days. Once the submission is approved, you will receive a confirmation e-mail and it will appear automatically in INSPIRE as a temporary record that will probably get further curation afterwards. Moreover, please do not worry if some processes like reference extraction and indexing may take some time.

You can find more information about how to use our suggestion form in our Help page.

We hope that you will find this new feature useful. As always, we are waiting for your feedback. You can send us an e-mail or try out the new Send Feedback widget on the right side of every INSPIRE Labs page. Let us know what you think about our new forms!

What is INSPIRE Labs and why are we creating this platform?

INSPIRE Labs will be a new place where you can test new features and interact with our team of programmers and designers through various methods of feedback so that the finished result will be as close as possible to your needs and expectations. INSPIRE Labs is not a replacement for INSPIRE, but is used as an incubator for features and suggestions that might help the community to evolve its current tools and workflow. With a modern look and responsive design, INSPIRE Labs is going to facilitate your everyday academic, HEP related activities.

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Figure 1: INSPIRE Labs logo

What we are currently working on  

INSPIRE Labs uses new technologies to build advanced features and intuitive interfaces in order to provide you with a better and faster service. The first feature that will be introduced is the suggestion form that will help you suggest publications easily and effectively, suggestions that could be included to INSPIRE. You will find more information and tips in our next blog post! Another part of this effort is a fresh redesign and revisit of INSPIRE’s services as individual blocks of a single information architecture. Our core collections will stay the same, with one significant addition though the data collection, which will provide you a centralised search point to find data sets, software and other supporting material.

And there are plenty more things to come…

In the near future, you will see more and more features appear in Labs! You can expect visually and functionally upgraded versions of some of the already known features of INSPIRE as part of this effort. We will make changes to evolve the interface and functionality of one of the most basic aspects of INSPIRE, the search tool! Our main goal is to improve the look and the functionality, so that you can search better and faster in the future.

However, your feedback is vital in this process. We have developed an easy to find feedback button at the right side of INSPIRE Labs. Feedback is easier than ever!

Do not hesitate to share with us all of your ideas and concerns. Let’s try to bring INSPIRE closer to your needs. Stay up to date for sneak peaks on new features and other news on our blog and twitter and don’t forget to check our blog next week to find out more about our new suggestion form!