Highlights
- ORCID has assessed ourselves against the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)
- Though ORCID is not yet ready to unequivocally adopt the POSI Principles, we acknowledge the importance of the initiative, as well as the conversations and collaborations generated by such a community-wide initiative
- ORCID is eager to engage with the group of current POSI adopters and the broader scholarly infrastructure community to further evolve POSI in an open, transparent way
In 2015, a blog post was published articulating a new set of principles “by which open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained.” The authors espoused that the principles they set forth, called the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), “could support the creation of successful shared infrastructures” by ensuring community governance, sustainability of funding and preservation of community ownership.
In the blog post, the authors noted that conversation and these principles had their genesis in the community concerns and discussions that led to ORCID’s creation, and noted that ORCID’s Founding Principles, established by ORCID’s inaugural Board in 2010, “represented the first attempt to address the issue of community trust which have developed in our conversations since to include additional issues.”
In 2020, the Crossref board formally adopted and endorsed POSI, shortly thereafter followed by Dryad and ROR. Since then, 16 additional organizations have adopted the principles, making for a total of 19 current adopters, the most recent adopting the principles this year.
ORCID’s position on POSI
ORCID’s 10 Founding Principles stress openness, trust, and inclusivity, with no-charge access for researchers, who maintain full control of their data. We believe that ORCID’s strict adherence to our own Founding Principles, that center strongly on the concepts of community governance and researcher control, has been essential to winning the trust and participation of researchers themselves, and this in turn has been essential to the wide uptake and utilization of ORCID across the globe by researchers and institutions alike. Given the obvious similarities and historic links between ORCID’s Principles and values and POSI, we are asked from time to time about our stance on POSI.
While we are not yet ready to fully adopt the POSI Principles, as set out further below, we believe now is a helpful time to publish our self assessment against the POSI Principles in order to clarify our position and to encourage community discussion about how they can be further refined and improved. With this in mind, ORCID has undertaken a self-assessment not only of our own performance against the POSI Principles, but to compare them with the 10 Founding Principles that have guided our activities since the beginning of ORCID.
Our detailed self-assessment has confirmed our long-held belief that POSI is indeed broadly aligned with our own Founding Principles and values. While we agree with the “spirit” of nearly all of the POSI Principles, we have identified some inconsistencies between how certain POSI Principles are currently written, how most of the current POSI adopters have interpreted them, and how we operate. According to the POSI website, adoption of the POSI Principles is meant to be a “statement of intent” to comply with them, even if the organization is not fully compliant.
At ORCID we take principles very seriously. Our own 10 Founding Principles were established very early in our history and have never changed — we view them as a cast-iron promise to our community about how we will conduct ourselves. For this reason, until we are comfortable that all of the POSI Principles are specifically expressed in a way that we can fully get behind, we feel unable to formally adopt them in their current form.
We are encouraged to learn from discussions with some of the current POSI adopters that they are starting to work on an update to both the POSI Principles and the accompanying FAQ. ORCID is eager to participate in these discussions and we stand committed to engage with the POSI adopters group and the broader scholarly infrastructure community in this work to further evolve POSI.
ORCID seeks to be as transparent as possible in taking decisions, and we strive to formulate policy with robust community input. We encourage the POSI adopters group to adopt a similar open and transparent approach to building community consensus around the next version of POSI. In our self-assessment, we have also included commentary about each of the principles which serves as our feedback to the POSI adopters, our suggestions about how they can be improved, and our questions about the way how they should be interpreted.
We invite you to review ORCID’s POSI Self-Assessment, and reach out to us with feedback if you wish.
