In “bring your own identity” I suggested that ORCID researcher identifiers might be important to rethinking the relationship between academics and universities.

At the Heads of eLearning Forum (HELF) meeting this week, Dave White from Oxford’s TALL Centre described how there are different currencies for academic credibility. The established currency is books, articles and conference proceedings (in my slides below you will see them referred to as library stuff’n’ting). The new currency is blogs, tweets, slides and videos.

Altmetrics is a term that has come to mean the broadening of what we count as scholarship and how we value it. I would characterise services like figshare, PeerJ and mendeley as “cool social scholarship”, they borrow the qualities of the new currency and bring them alongside the established currency. What the ORCID ecosystem does is enable these cool social scholarship services to come into their own.Then layering across all of that, altmetrics-focussed services like impactstory and plum analytics allow these wide range of outputs to be reaggregated along with information about usage, reach, engagement and that ellusive and contentious concept of “impact”.

What it could mean for universities is that instead of having to host all an academic’s outputs, and instead of having academics fill in forms about their outputs, the university can ask for an ORCID number and then use services like impactstory to map an academic’s outputs online.