Discovering Scholarly Orphans Using ORCID

Abstract: Archival efforts such as (C)LOCKSS and Portico are in place to ensure the longevity of traditional scholarly resources like journal articles. At the same time, researchers are depositing a broad variety of other scholarly artifacts into emerging online portals that are designed to support web-based scholarship. These web-native scholarly objects are largely neglected by current archival practices and hence they become scholarly orphans. We therefore argue for a novel paradigm that is tailored towards archiving these scholarly orphans. We are investigating the feasibility of using Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) as a supporting infrastructure for the process of discovery of web identities and scholarly orphans for active researchers. We analyze ORCID in terms of coverage of researchers, subjects, and location and assess the richness of its profiles in terms of web identities and scholarly artifacts. We find that ORCID currently lacks in all considered aspects and hence can only be considered in conjunction with other discovery sources. However, ORCID is growing fast so there is potential that it could achieve a satisfactory level of coverage and richness in the near future.