AAU executive vice president John Vaughn speaks about the value of ORCID iDs to the university community at the 10/30/13 ORCID Outreach Meeting in Washington, DC.

1. Integration of Persistent
Identifiers:
a University Perspective
John Vaughn
Executive Vice President
Association of American Universities

2. AAU Organization and Operation
• Founded in 1900 by 14 universities that offered
the PhD
• Initial purpose: improve, standardize PhD
education
• Current Membership: 60 US, 2 Canadian
universities – 36 public, 26 private

3. AAU Organization and Operation
• Member presidents meet twice a year; also
convene:
– chief academic officers
– senior research officers
– graduate deans
– government relations officers
– public affairs officers

4. AAU Mission
• Develop and implement national policies
supporting research and scholarship, graduate
and undergraduate education
• Provide forum for discussion of institutional
policies that strengthen the association’s
member institutions

5. AAU Universities’ Impact on Research and Education
• 58% of all federal research funds to colleges and
universities
• 15% of bachelor’s degrees, 45% of research doctorate
degrees, 65% of postdoctoral positions
• 75% of members of the National Academy of Sciences
• From 2007-2011:
 1.13 million publications, 67% of US total, 19% of world total
 10.6 million citations, 89% of US total, 35% of world total

6. AAU Engagement in Scholarly Communication
Issues
• Mid-1980s – AAU/ARL Research Libraries project:
 acquisition and distribution of foreign language and area studies
materials
 intellectual property rights in the digital environment
 a national strategy for managing scientific and technological
information
• 1999 -- Intellectual Property and New Media Technologies:
A Framework for Policy Development at AAU Institutions
• 2000 – Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly
Communication

7. AAU Engagement in Scholarly Communication
Issues
• 2002 – AAU/ARL/APS – New Economic Model for
Scholarly Publishing
• 2009 – Scholarly Publishing Roundtable
• Current: OSTP Public Access Memorandum
SHARE – an ARL/AAU/APLU initiative

8. SHared Access to Research Ecosystem -- SHARE
• Cross-institutional network of digital repositories
• Ensure access to, preservation and reuse of results of
federally funded research
• Enable university researchers to submit research
articles to federal agency-designated repositories using
a single, common user interface, with SHARE packaging
and delivering relevant metadata, files, and links
• Ensure compliance with agency requirements

9. Why Are Universities Building SHARE?
• Knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation a core
mission of universities
• University interest in collecting and preserving their
scholarly output to assure access, and also for internal
operational and analytic purposes
• Making research articles, data and their associated
metadata publicly accessible for reuse, text mining, data
mining and machine reading will enhance and accelerate
the creation and discovery of new knowledge

10. SHARE and ORCID
• A national, federated system of interoperable
repositories will need a registry of researcher
identifiers like ORCID
• Science and scholarship global: SHARE must
interconnect with similar repositories in Europe,
Asia, and elsewhere; ORCID’s international scope
critical

11. International Research Collaborations
• US research universities and their faculty increasingly
collaborate with universities in other countries: 1960s
– 86% of APS journal authors US; last 10 years – 37%
• AAU/ARU research and education collaboration
• Hefei Statement on characteristics of research
universities: AAU, LERU, Go8, C9
• Global Research Council: Beijing, May, 2014: public
access, research careers

12. University Benefits of Persistent Researcher Identifiers
• Reduce administrative burden on faculty and staff by
auto-populating grant biosketches and other required
reporting forms
• Facilitate better management of research on campus
• Support more effective tracking of outcomes from
researchers at all levels (grad students, postdocs, faculty)
• Better describe multi-sector collaborations and round out
the picture of local and regional economic impact

13. Benefits to University Associations
• Allow a better understanding of workforce dynamics
(within and across regions, disciplines, and types of
institutions)
• Assist in advocacy efforts by providing more data about
collaboration and flows of researchers across institutions
and sectors
• Assist in advocacy by allowing data and anecdotes to be
more easily united to explain the value of university
research to policymakers and other external audiences

14. Challenges for University Integration of Persistent Identifiers
Researchers must see the benefit of a researcher ID to provide
the incentive to participate
Concern that while persistent identifiers may make certain
kinds of activities easier, may also lead to new reporting
requirements
ORCID identifiers could facilitate a mechanistic evaluation of
research productivity –
and encourage differential impacts across disciplines:
physical, life sciences vs social sciences and humanities

15. Challenges for University Integration of Persistent Identifiers
• Decentralization – campuses and units within them use
different systems and have different organizations
• Complex hierarchy of researchers at large institutions (PIs,
postdocs, research staff), some of whom may move
frequently among institutions
• Institutions could be the place where researchers first “enter
the system” (i.e., grad students publishing their first paper)
so may need special rules for that
• Disciplinary societies, not institutions, set many of the norms
for researchers

16. Actions to Facilitate Adoption by Universities and Their Faculties
• Incentives targeted to several levels: administrators
and faculty both need to understand the benefits of
ORCID and how it fits into the myriad related initiatives
of government agencies, publishers, universities,
societies, and more
• A brief FAQ, written in plain language, that addresses
key issues, including privacy, could help
• The Sloan-funded adoption and integration grants
recently awarded by ORCID can serve as case studies to
provide examples for other institutions