Exploring researchers' participation in online research identity management systems

Prior studies have identified a need for engaging researchers in providing and curating their identity data. This poster reports preliminary findings of a qualitative study exploring how researchers use and engage in online research identity management (RIM) systems. The findings identify nine activity or task related motivations of using RIM systems. This study also identified three levels of participation in RIM systems: Readers, Personal Record Managers, and Community Members. Most participants of this study fell into the category of Personal Record Managers, who may maintain their own profiles in a RIM system. This suggests that a majority of researchers may be willing to maintain their research identity profiles. Institutional repository managers may consider recruiting researchers as not only research information and data providers, but also curators of their own research identity data.