The case for #Wikimedia Foundation as an #ORCID member organisation

The Wikimedia Foundation is a research organisation. No two ways about it; it has its own researchers that not only perform research on the Wikimedia projects and communities, they coordinate research on Wikimedia projects and communities and it produces its own publications. As such it qualifies to become an ORCID Member organisation.

The benefits are:

• Authenticating ORCID iDs of individuals using the ORCID API to ensure that researchers are correctly identified in your systems
• Displaying iDs to signal to researchers that your systems support the use of ORCID
• Connecting information about affiliations and contributions to ORCID records, creating trusted assertions and enabling researchers to easily provide validated information to systems and profiles they use
• Collecting information from ORCID records to fill in forms, save researchers time, and support research reporting
• Synchronizing between research information systems to improve reporting speed and accuracy and reduce data entry burden for researchers and administrators alike

At this time the quality of information about Wikimedia research is hardly satisfactory. As is the standard; announcements are made about a new paper and as can be expected the paper is not in Wikidata. The three authors are not in ORCID, as is usual for people who work in the field of computing so there is no easy way to learn about their publications.

What will this achieve; it will be the Wikimedia Foundation itself that will push information about its research to ORCID and consequently at Wikidata we can easily update the latest and greatest. It is also an important step for documentation about becoming discoverable. It is one thing to publish Open Content, when it is then hard to find, it is still not FAIR and the research does not have the hoped for impact. It also removes an issue that some researchers say they face; they cannot publish about themselves on Wikimedia projects. 

Another important plus; by indicating the importance of having scholarly papers known in ORCID we help reluctant scientists understand that yes, they have a career in open source, open systems but finding their work is very much needed to be truly open.

Thanks,

       GerardM