Two organisations, ORCID and CrossRef, have collaborated to solve the problem of ambiguous author names in scholarly content. ORCID began assigning unique identifiers to researchers in October.

ORCID, was established in 2010 as non-profit organisation serving the research community. You may contact the Executive Director Laure Haak at l.haak@orcid.org and follow @ORCID_Org on Twitter.

Scrutiny of scholarly publications and research data has traditionally been undertaken through peer review and proprietary bibliometrics. But should article level metrics alone be used to evaluate the impact of research? Increasingly practitioners are turning to social networks such as blogs, Twitter and Mendeley to assess the scholarly impact of published works.

Open Exeter Data Asset Framework Survey, is a recently published study by The University of Exeter, on data management practice and attitudes to Open Access. The findings for the University has helped them to gain a better understanding of current research data management practices across different disciplines and with different levels of research experience.

Findings included:

Simon Marginson reported in The Australian this week, "We're fighting above our weight when it comes to uni ranking". The article examines how Australian Universities compare within the global rankings.

David Glance, Director of the Centre for Software Practices at University of Western Australia wrote in The Conversation on the 8th July 2012, a thought provoking article on the long tail of academic publishing. The main point being, that the high publication rates of a few high achieving academics is generally matched by the many academics with modest outputs and that universities should not overlook th

Heather Morrison's blog post the June 30, 2012 Dramatic Growth of Open Access http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/07/inevitability-of-open-access-june-30.html provides an excellent summary of open access search engines, world archives and the recent growth of their content. Here is a snap shot of the figures:

ORCID - Open Researcher & Contributor ID - is an international, interdisciplinary, open and not-for-profit organisation committed to enhancing the scientific discovery process, improving collaboration and increasing the efficiency of research funding.

The Finch Report is the result of a Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch. The independent working group was set up to examine "how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible." (Read the Press Release here.)

PeerJ offers academics two Open Access publication options:

PeerJ - a peer-reviewed open access academic journal
PeerJ PrePrints - a 'pre-print' server that allows you to gain credit and feedback from peers before publishing.

According to the Nature Publishing Index 2011, China now publishes more than 6% of papers published in Nature journals. In 2011, 225 of the 3425 papers published in Nature journals were represented by China.