OSCR

Claiming authorship

Being a paper's verified author on OSCR lets you correct its links, validate its tracing map, and have your removal requests applied at once. Most authors become one without asking anything.

When your ORCID iD is on the paper

Sign in with ORCID (or link your ORCID identity to your account). Every paper whose published metadata lists your ORCID iD among its authors is then yours at once, and appears under "Your papers" on your account page. The check runs at each sign-in; "Check my papers again" runs it on request, after OSCR has read a new paper of yours, for instance. It relies on the iDs that publishers deposit. An iD counts only when it is in the paper's own metadata; the site does not guess an iD from a name.

Otherwise, a claim

Many papers list the iDs of only some of their authors. If you are an author and the paper's metadata does not have your iD, open the paper's page, signed in, and use "Claim this paper" in its Contribute section: say why you are one of its authors (1,000 characters at most, no email address) and, if you can, give a page that shows it (your lab's page, your ORCID record listing the paper). Your account page shows the claim and its answer.

How a claim is decided

By published rules (the moderation policy), which OSCR's machine applies within minutes. A claim is verified when the paper lists your ORCID iD among its authors, or when Crossref's automatic update has put the paper in your ORCID record, which it does once the paper's publisher deposited your iD with it. A waiting claim is checked again every day. You then become a verified author of the paper, a role the automatic check never takes back. Link your ORCID identity to your account: the rules look for the paper in that iD's record.

  • The rules do not count a work you added to your ORCID record yourself, or through a search tool, because anyone can add any paper to their record. They also do not count a statement or a web page; only the operator reads those.
  • In the other cases the claim waits for the operator, who may accept it. At the moment no human moderator is on duty, so a claim not verified within 30 days is closed, with how to claim again. A new claim is checked again. A decision of the operator stays in force.
  • The operator may also take back a role the rules granted by mistake.

At most 20 claims may wait at once for an account, and 10 author claims may be sent a day.

Maintainers of the code

Maintaining a paper's code is a different role. It is proven on the forge that hosts the code, such as GitHub: see roles. A maintainer who owns the repository, or is a public member of its organization, may correct what the record says of it. A contributor cannot.