ORCID, Hypothes.is and NIF partner on Helmsley Trust-supported open annotation project
The Hypothes.is Project together with partners at the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) and ORCID has been awarded a 3-year, $2.2M grant by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to bring annotation to biomedicine. Web annotations, a new standard for digital notes on top of an existing online resource, are proving transformative in diverse fields from scholarly publishing to education, open government, and journalism. This project will bring these advances to biomedicine, where they have the potential to make a unique impact.
Biomedical researchers are faced with a rapidly growing body of literature and data, yet extracting, citing and sharing individual components in a digital and interactive way remains elusive. References to small data sets, embedded figures and widely catalogued research objects (such as proteins, structures and species) remain difficult to associate with contributors or commentary, surface to researchers and retrieve through open web search. Consequently, researchers are hampered in their ability to effectively discover, and leverage the information around them.
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Annotations provide a powerful new way for researchers to organize their thoughts and notes on web content. These can be shared one on one, in small groups or publicly with other collaborators as preferred. Annotations can warn about quality issues, suggest modifications to experimental techniques or simply provide helpful background information.
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Annotations are an example of the new paradigm of micro or “nanopublication” — new publishing capabilities that enable a more granular approach to research communication that hasn’t been possible until now. Micropublishing permits a more rapid dissemination of experience, including details about aborted efforts or unsuccessful protocols. The enhanced visibility of small or one-off trials and bench experiments can suggest fruitful avenues to deepen an investigation for those better trained or resourced, along with the release of small amounts of data and statistical results.
Joining together annotations with RRIDs and the ORCID unique researcher identifier can transform biomedical research by creating an interlocking and interoperable set of open source research assets that bring precision in location, attribution and reference.
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The partners will collaborate to incorporate ORCID contributor identifiers into annotations and into publisher workflows along with RRIDs, as well as exposing scholarly annotation activity in the ORCID interface.
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