A quick search of my blog feeds turned up surprisingly little on ResearcherID – just 8 posts from my fairly populous repository oriented RSS aggregation, all from 2008, they include this post from June 2008 on the Wrap Repository blog which emphasises that “it would be easier for the author if there were a universal unique identifier that could help us all to share information about the author in a more automated way” and a post on the principles of citation-based evaluation from Overdue Ideas in which @ostephens summarises a session by James Pringle from Thomson Reuters and voices concern about how the work being done by Thomson Reuters “joins up with activity in the sector, and by other organisations. How does ‘ResearcherID.com’ link to OCLC Identities work? It would be great to see some joined up thinking across the library/information sector on this, as otherwise we will end up with multiple methods of identification.”
So it seems that ResearcherID received a flurry of attention when is was released back in 2008 but is still just one potential solution to an ongoing issue – as I noted in a recent post, Open Research Online is using a unique University ID in their EPrints repository (though I need to do more reading, other solutions mooted in the blogosphere seem to be OpenID and OCLC identities.) I also searched http://www.researcherid.com/ for “Leeds Metropolitan University” and found just 4 of our researchers in the database…
Nevertheless, in terms of the of the Bibliosight project, and the wider context of the Leeds Met repository, ResearcherID could well be an appropriate solution, and is certainly worth exploring further with the project team and with the URO…just a very quick note on practicalities; batch upload to ResearcherID would require us to prepare a detailed XML document which, to my mark-up phobic eye, looks decidedly none trivial – it would need to comprise records for all leeds Met researchers of course. This is an example (view in IE or FF; Chrome will interpret the XML rather than show mark-up)
