There has been legitimate concern about the future of Twitter over the last week due to its new ownership and management. This is pretty upsetting considering how great it’s been to use to connect to and to follow other researchers. OpenCheck is currently working to map Twitter handles to ORCID identifiers and capture the directed follow graph of researchers on Twitter in case the service becomes unusable in the near future. This post is about my initial exploration of the resource. Update in November 2024 - OpenCheck has been shut down.

How It Works

The OpenCheck website is pretty sleek. There are two big buttons to connect it to your Twitter account and ORCID account. After authorization, it uses the Twitter API to look your followers and follows. Then, it looks up if any of those Twitter accounts have also registered and adds it to this CSV which they make available under the permissive CC0 license.

Wikidata to the Rescue

My first thought was that there are tons of ORCID-Twitter connections available under the CC0 license through Wikidata that they could use to complement this content. The following SPARQL query retrieves all of these links:

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?orcid ?twitter
WHERE 
{
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5; 
        wdt:P496 ?orcid; 
        wdt:P2002 ?twitter .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

This query can be run using the Wikidata Query Service by following this link and pressing the play button. As of November 15th, 2022, it returns 13,784 results.

Graph Machine Learning

The OpenCheck ORCID graph is a relatively small directed graph, so my second thought was that would be interesting to apply some graph machine learning methodologies to it. I wrote a simple script using GRAPE to learn low-dimensional vector representations (i.e., embeddings) for nodes in the graph (i.e., ORCID identifiers) that could be useful for clustering, classification, or other downstream machine learning tasks. These resulting embeddings for each ORCID identifier can be downloaded as a TSV file here and are summarized below:

I put this script in cthoyt/opencheck-embed and additionally configured GitHub Actions to automatically re-run the script every night to generate new embeddings for the newest dataset.

I had first tested the idea of continuous analysis built on top of GitHub’s continuous integration service by periodically generating differential reaction fingerprints on the Rhea reaction database in cthoyt/rhea-fingerprints. The OpenCheck ORCID graph is a different scenario because the data are updated in real time and aren’t versioned. Overall, I think these are both good examples of what is possible using modern, public infrastructure, and I would like to see them used in more and more scientific workflows.

It appears that OpenCheck is an effort from a company called Metarational, LLC run by John Beatty that has has a more long-term goal of supporting verification online (i.e., better than an $8 blue star). I’m excited to see what they do next!

If you want to make sure that your ORCID, Twitter, and other academic profiles on the internet are linked, check out my previous post on curating your own Wikidata profile.