Month: September 2015

New SWITCH story: “Empowering Swiss research”

The Swiss edu-ID project is partly funded through the funding programme P-2 of swissuniversities. The project manager of P-2, Roland Dietlicher, shares his views on the achievements and challenges of the funding programme P-2 in the latest SWITCH story. In doing that, he also covers the importance of the academic identity Swiss edu-ID to the success of the P-2 programme.

Less hassle, less effort

The Swiss edu-ID can help with a range of problems. The latest SWITCH story highlights two examples:

  • Swissbib allows to search most of the Swiss libraries and repositories at once. Users can specify favourite libraries, save reading lists, view their search history and much more besides. Since Swiss edu-ID users can keep their account for an unlimited time, they no longer lose account data when their employment or student status changes as is the case with SWITCHaai.
  • Roberto Mazzoni, Head of User Services in the Central IT Department at the University of Zurich, points out specific advantages of the Swiss edu-ID with respect to the current situation with SWITCHaai: It simplifies identity management processes and reduces the risk to create duplications.

Please follow this link to access the SWITCH story.

Could ORCID iD replace the Swiss edu-ID?

Before I bluntly say ‘no!’, let me try to explain why the question arises at all (and why it is reasonable to ask it).

The term ORCID ID actually refers to many things. Technically, it is 1) a unique identifier, 2) a login with a username and password and 3) personal attributes associated with the unique identifier. While I initially thought that the ORCID iD was only an identifier, it turned out that the ORCID community has built an extensive set of additional services over the last few years. Continue reading “Could ORCID iD replace the Swiss edu-ID?”