ORCID Engagement Manager Asia-Pacific, Estelle Cheng, recently spoke with Wen-Yau Cathy Lin, an academic, author and scholarly journal editor about ORCID and its use in Taiwan.
Please can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I did my PhD work at the Department and Graduate Institute of Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University. I’m currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Library Science, Tamkang University, and formerly worked in special and academic libraries. I’ve had a lot of experience working with international academia and academic publishers. I’m also currently Executive Editor of the Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences and former Assistant Editor of the Journal of Library and Information Science Research, which are both indexed in the Taiwan Social Sciences Citation Index.
When and why did you register for an ORCID iD?
In March 2011, the Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences and Tamkang University held an academic conference for the journal’s 40th anniversary. One of the keynote speakers, former ORCID Board member, Prof. Hideaki Takeda, who spoke about the development of Open Access publishing in Japan, was also a point person in Japan’s ORCID community. He told us about a tool that allowed journal publishers to facilitate authority control for authors of journal articles. That was the first time I heard about ORCID. Some time later, about early 2013, I registered for an ORCID ID and suggested to Prof. Jeong-Yeou Chiu, Chief Editor of the Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences, the possibility of adopting ORCID in our journal. Later, in the January 2014 issue’s editorial, Prof. Chiu wrote that the journal would begin requiring authors’ ORCID IDs in all issues going forward.
How are you using your iD?
Whenever I encounter a portfolio where I have to add my CV or research details and I can also add an ORCID ID, I do so because it’s the best use of my information to have it integrated together.
Is ORCID widely used in your community? Why/why not?
At first ORCID wasn’t widely used, but recently it’s become more and more common to see. Especially when it comes to journal and conference submission, it’s often required these days.
What details are unique to ORCID users in Taiwan?
Some universities in Taiwan are promoting ORCID adoption using a top-down approach institutionally, especially by utilising ORCID to link their researchers portfolio, grant, and promotion. They’re doing this to encourage researchers to use ORCID to good effect.
What is your perspective on advocating for ORCID in the community here?
Although the Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences has required authors to include ORCID IDs to submit manuscripts for more than five years, some researchers continue to merely register for an ID, leaving their record untouched and so meeting only the minimum requirements. We can’t really force authors to be more active in maintaining their ORCID records. So, we’re hoping more organisations and publishers will adopt ORCID because we believe that will lead to more authors understanding the benefits of promoting their academic works through tools like ORCID.
What can we do to improve our support for researchers like you and for your community?
If ORCID can encourage government institutions and the various funding agencies to better utilise their research management systems by using ORCID, that will certainly increase ORCID adoption.
What’s your favorite thing about ORCID?
That you can take all kinds of your own research outputs, integrate them into one well-connected platform, and link them to journal and conference submission systems. This not only helps improve the academic community’s ability to recognise individual academic output, but also in its own way ORCID facilitates the circulation of academic outputs.
What three words sum up ORCID for you?
Comprehensive, clean and clear, sustainable
