One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201...
@smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's Papers and sync my Bibtex fies.
@afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia.
Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-pressure??
I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.
A large chunk of ORCID actually is open source: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source (though I don't necessarily agree that it should be, since ORCID is not a library or tool, but rather a service that only has real value if there's a single instance in existence).
I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity.
Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published.
ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.
Not worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one login provider.
Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.
ORCID is sneaky in the way it's integrating itself into existing publisher workflows so seamlessly. All the vendors up and down the traditional academic publishing food chain seem to be racing to support it.
ORCID is non-profit. There are some organisations, such as ORCID, who exist for the purpose of facilitating the academic publishing 'industry' rather than making money out of it.
Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.
I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing.
So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go.
Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.
Sure, I think that's what will happen. But I don't think there's any other way of doing it.
ORCID is solving the problem of identifying and crediting individual academics, not necessarily because the academics are frustrated (as, I think, is the motivation behind academia.edu) but for practical metadata reasons.
For sure lots of publishers are going to start saying 'do you have an ORCID?' and vice versa. I think the alternative is lots of publishers each saying 'could you log in to our custom identity service'. Around the circle we go, as you say. But what's wrong with that? It's all in the open, it's all documented, it's all (as far as I can tell) open source. And it's OAuth2 FWIW.
