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In 2010 I was seconded by Crossref for to be ORCID’s first director of technology. At one point there was an impasse in the community over the who would “own” an ORCID record and what strategy ORCID should use to “deduplicate” records. I wrote this paper to try and cut through the thicket of assumptions and misunderstandings. Disambiguation without de-duplication: Modeling authority and trust in the ORCID system.

In 2010 I was seconded by Crossref for to be ORCID’s first director of technology. This was the document I wrote proposing what was eventually to become the ORCID identifier. The Structure of the ORCID Identifier

I was invited to speak at an internal Wiley-Blackwell seminar. Before the seminar, they interviewed me for their Publishing News. I can’t find a copy of the interview online anymore, so I have reproduced it below. I made several predictions in this interview, and it’s interesting to see which ones played out. As I review this (in 2024), I’m reminded of how insistent certain researchers were that publishers should make their articles easily available for text mining so that we could analyze the literature at scale. Of course, now we see researchers aghast that giant, well-funded AI companies have done precisely that to feed their LLMs. ...

In 2009 Martin Fenner sent me an email asking to interview me about the “Author Identifier” project I was working on for Crossref (later to become ORCID). I had no idea who Martin was, but he asked intelligent questions and so I answered them. The result is below. And Martin and I have been friends/colleagues ever since. Fenner, M. (2009). Author Identifiers: Interview with Geoffrey Bilder. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw1h

I was recently asked by somebody to speculate about generalizable application features that might help researchers in their work. I responded to them directly, but thought it might be worth repeating part of my response here. Since the early 1990s I’ve wished that the OS (any OS) would support a “Paste & Cite” feature and, now that I’m involved with CrossRef and its linking and (nascent) plagiarism detection initiatives, I am even more convinced that such a feature would be immensely valuable to anybody who does research. The basic idea behind the feature would be that the clipboard would also copy “provenance” information whenever somebody chose to copy something. Then, when the user decided to paste the content someplace else, it would offer an optional “Past & Cite” menu item. ...