The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative is working on a unique researcher identifier for the creation of a clear and unambiguous scholarly record. The initiative is supported by more than 140 universities, research institutes, funding organizations, publishers and other organizations interested in scholarly communication. The ORCID system will become publicly available in the first half of 2011.

On Wednesday the NCBI released an Images database, compiled from full text resources at the NCBI – initially PubMed Central articles. The images can be searched by several parameters, e.g. figure caption or author. Using this database, images are now displayed together with the PubMed abstract for PubMed Central articles. More info about these changes can be found in the NLM Bulletin.

Today I posted a document that should help define a set of principles for scientific attribution. These principles will be presented and discussed at the National Science Foundation workshop Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age on November 12. Many people helped me with this document (Cameron Neylon in particular), and I welcome comments and suggestions.

My post last week about citation rates of mandated vs. self-selected Open Accessfulfills resulted in an interesting discussion thanks to some good arguments made by Stevan Harnad. One personal conclusion for me: mandates for self-archiving are not a good idea. I would very much prefer researchers to be highly motivated to self-archive thanks to a repository that both fulfills important functions and is fun to use.

Biologist Gregory Petsko has written a monthly column for the journal Genome Biology since the journal launched in 2000. To mark the 10th anniversary of the column and the journal, Genome Biology created an eBook (iPad/iPhone: free, Kindle: 99 c) containing all columns up to August 2010. I downloaded the iBooks version for iPad/iPhone.

Two weeks ago I gave a presentation at the STM Annual Conference 2010 in Frankfurt (STM is the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers). I told the audience that publishers could do a much better job helping researchers create digital content – both by providing better tools and by reconsidering licenses for content reuse. A video of my presentation is available here.

Find out more at the Open Access Week website. And watch this blog for another Open Access story later today.

PLoS ONE today published a paper very relevant to Open Access Week (which started today): Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, Brody T, Harnad S. Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS ONE. 2010;5(10):e13636+. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.

The ArXiv preprint archive for research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science and related disciplines was initiated by Paul Ginsparg in 1991. ArXiv enables the rapid dissemination of research articles prior to peer review, and it quickly became very successful in this.

In the last few weeks I haven’t seen any announcement for a new science blogging network (the last one was probably Scientific American in September). So I thought today would be a good day to start a new one. Earlier today I wrote the first post on the first blog hosted by my institution.

Earlier this year I wrote about the Nature.com iPhone application that was released in February. Two weeks ago the app was updated with the following changes: * Access to abstracts from additional journals: Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Physics, and Nature Communications.