Encyclia

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Encyclia?

Encyclia, named after the flower genus, is a bridge service that allows users of Fediverse software (Mastodon etc.) to follow and share ORCID records, meaning whenever a researcher whose ORCID record you are following through Encyclia publishes a new article, you will see it in the home feed of your favorite federated social media app. Encyclia can be used to stay up to date with academics who don't otherwise have a Fediverse presence, or to remind yourself to share your own works. In the future, more features related to academic collaboration on the Fediverse will be added – we have some ideas already.

Encyclia uses the public ORCID API to reformat record data into ActivityPub posts. It is currently in a pre-alpha prototyping phase to gather feedback. This will be followed by a closed alpha test, during which only a select few ORCID records will be available for access through Encyclia. The plan for version 1.0 is to offer you the possibility of following any public ORCID record you want, whether it's to share your own research or to keep up to date with colleagues who don't use the Fediverse.

ORCID has always been clear that it considers itself a database of facts, not a social platform. You cannot use your ORCID record (note how ORCID avoids the term “profile”) to post updates or to contact other researchers. Encyclia is designed to preserve and enforce this distinction. As an ORCID record owner, you can access aggregated statistical information about your Encyclia followers and about interactions with your invidual works, but Encyclia accounts cannot be used to send or receive messages to/from other ActivityPub users and information about individual external accounts is not divulged.

“Encyclia” is the name of the software, “Encyclia.pub” is its main/flagship server. In the future, it will be possible to self-host Encyclia.

This is a free time project created and run by Julian Fietkau. It is not endorsed by ORCID, Inc. (nor, for that matter, by anyone else in particular). The server software is based on Fedify, Deno, and Fresh.

2. How do I follow an ORCID record?

You cannot – yet. Encyclia is currently in a pre-alpha stage in which ActivityPub federation is not yet enabled. You can check out the roadmap to learn where the project currently stands and what's left to do, or you can follow our Mastodon account to receive updates.

When Encyclia is complete and public, the process to follow an account will most likely look like this:

First, identify the specific ORCID record you'd like to follow. You can use the ORCID website to search for people by name if you need to. Ypu may also find ORCID iDs listed on academic papers, on university staff websites, or in digital libraries.

Next, take the 16-digit numeric ID unique to each ORCID record (for example, mine is 0000-0001-7264-8496) and look it up in your Fediverse platform's search box as follows:

@0000-0001-7264-8496@encyclia.pub

Alternatively, you can take the full ORCID record URL and replace the orcid.org name with encyclia.pub, like so:

https://encyclia.pub/0000-0001-7264-8496

In almost any Fediverse software, either option will show you the followable account in question. Then all you need to do is click “follow”!

3. Who is making this? Can I help?

I, Julian Fietkau (@julian@fietkau.social), am currently the sole author, maintainer and administrator of Encyclia. I am a hobbyist web developer with a computer science degree that I normally use for academic work in the field of human-computer interaction. Like many of my software projects, I'm building Encyclia because I think it can be very useful for myself and for others. I've seen similar ideas bandied about, but no one putting forward an actual implementation.

I'm employed as a post-doc at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich (which has no involvement in this project) and earn a comfortable salary there, one that allows me to fund Encyclia's running costs out of my own pocket. I'm optimistic to keep it that way, and as such, Encyclia does not accept monetary donations.

As for implementation contributions, I believe I have the feature work more or less covered, but with this being my first time working seriously with TypeScript, the server-side JavaScript ecosystem (I have never done anything with Node), and the associated architecture patterns, there are some areas where I particularly notice my lack of experience:

If you are experienced in either of these areas and would like to volunteer some of your time, whether before or after Encyclia's open source release, do feel free to reach out – as long as you are ready to deal with beginner-level code.

Oh, and if I'm currently working on this alone, why does the rest of the website use “we”? That's mainly so I don't have to change it everywhere if the team does end up growing past the count of one. Also, I'm used to it from my academic writing.

4. Wouldn't it make sense for ORCID to run this in-house?

We would certainly love to see some more initiative from ORCID in the realm of decentralized social platforms, but the situation they're in is also understandable: resource-wise, they have to be very conscientious about what risks to take, and it may well be that they're better off focusing on their REST API and open data practices to enable ventures like this done by third parties. For what it's worth, in the talks we've had with people from ORCID, they always seemed really into the idea of getting open bibliographic data shared more widely and more easily, even if they have not been eager to put much implementation effort into interoperable social platforms directly.

That said, not every improvement has to be a big upheaval. Even if Encyclia remains a standalone project, there are minor tweaks that ORCID could make to their web server configuration to allow Encyclia to serve ActivityPub accounts using the @orcid.org domain. In our opinion, being able to use any existing ORCID iD directly as a Fediverse URL instead of having to change the hostname to @encyclia.pub each time would be very cool! If you're with ORCID and you'd like to help make this happen, please contact me.

5. Can I stop my own ORCID record from appearing on the Fediverse?

Yes, you can! Right now, Encyclia's ORCID record bridging functionality is not active yet, but if you're already certain that you don't want your ORCID record to be followable through Encyclia in the future, you can use the “Sign in with ORCID” button on the home page to make changes to how Encyclia handles your ORCID record, including an option to opt out of the bridge entirely. Any opt-out decisions made now will be kept and honored when account federation goes live.

You might be wondering why Encyclia is tentatively planned to be opt-out rather than using the consent-based opt-in model favored by many of the more privacy-conscious users of ActivityPub software. In our experience, discussions on this topic often get bogged down in minutiae about what exactly it means for something to be “public” and lose focus on the actual needs and wishes of the people affected. We expect that the vast, vast majority of ORCID record holders will never learn of Encyclia, so the pertinent question is: what is the kind and respectful way for Encyclia to treat them and their information? We arrived at the conclusion that, specifically for this use case and information source, opt-out is the correct default, based on the following central considerations:

  1. The contents of an ORCID record are bibliographic facts, not works of personal expression like one would find in social media accounts.
  2. The potential for misuse of ORCID record data for nefarious purposes such as stalking or harassment, which are relevant concerns for social media platforms, is practically nonexistent.
  3. An overwhelming majority of academics would prefer metadata about their citable works to be shared as often and as widely as possible, and are extremely likely to welcome new avenues for their work to get around, regardless of whether they personally use those avenues.

A more in-depth examination of this question and our conclusion can be found in this impact analysis document.

All that said, this decision is not final. During the time until the start of Encyclia's next phase, we are eager to hear feedback on this topic, especially concerning other dangers or aspects we may have failed to identify in advance.

6. Can I follow Encyclia accounts from Bluesky?

In short: no, not in the foreseeable future. That's not because of any insurmountable technical challenges in adding ATproto support, but more so because Encyclia's architecture takes advantage of some properties of ActivityPub to save resources in a way that would likely not mesh well with Bluesky and its technical and social assumptions. A longer explanation needs to go into detail about the differences between decentralized social protocols, so if you're technically minded and curious enough, here comes the nitty-gritty.

In the ActivityPub world, a follow relationship is an entry on a publish-subscribe list on the sender's side, messages (posts) are sent to where they're needed, and global search is best-effort. These affordances allow Encyclia to bridge ORCID records purely on demand: whenever someone first looks up a particular ORCID iD through ActivityPub/WebFinger (or on the website), that's when the record data is fetched and transformed into an ActivityPub account. This process is invisible and seamless apart from an additional small delay during the first time the account is loaded. Then as long as someone is following the account, Encyclia can keep it in the update queue. If an Encyclia bridge account is unfollowed by all its followers, that means its future posts would not be going anywhere, so to save technical (and financial) resources, Encyclia can deep-freeze it until whenever it is needed again, and catch up on ORCID data updates then. This on-demand account provisioning allows Encyclia to scale organically along with its usage and to run on a cheap-as-dirt server setup as long as just a few people rely on it.

By contrast in ATproto, a follow relationship is a firehose filter on the recipient's side, messages are always globally visible, and search is expected to be exhaustive. This means that to be a “good citizen” in the ATmosphere, Encyclia would ideally be bridging all ORCID records at all times, keeping them up to date and available for whenever any of them are needed, for example in a keyword-based search. This is not as unrealistic as it may sound at a glance. ORCID offers bulk downloads of its dataset, which at time of writing are less than a terabyte in size uncompressed. By additionally piggybacking on an institution with access to the ORCID premium membership API, a combination of the premium-exclusive bulk data sync process and webhook APIs could be used to keep the full database up to date in real time fairly efficiently, whereas the current implementation using the public ORCID API has to rely on polling for updates. With the caveat that we have not done any quantitative estimations, we suspect that an architecture along those lines could be well in reach of an institution supportive of the idea or an enthusiast with somewhat deep pockets.

It is, however, not a direction we currently want to take Encyclia in, so for the time being, this bridge is going with on-demand account provisioning and backdated posts – in the ActivityPub ecosystem, where this approach can function smoothly.

7. Are there any restrictions on how Encyclia can be used?

Encyclia is built to be used by humans. If you are a person wanting to follow ORCID records via ActivityPub, there are no hard restrictions on the number of accounts you can follow. So please don't feel guilty if you'd like to follow dozens or even hundreds of people – we'll try to figure out the technical efficiency as we go.

If you want to curate ORCID records for others, that is also something Encyclia endorses. You can share lists (including “starter packs”) of Encyclia accounts or build ActivityPub bots that follow and auto-share them (hi Newsmast!), as long as everything is ultimately curated by humans for reading by humans.

Please do not mass-follow or mass-enumerate Encyclia accounts for the purpose of data collection. If you need programmatic access to ORCID data, you are better served by ORCID's API or their bulk data downloads. Encyclia.pub reserves the option to block attempts at data harvesting using any technological measures at our disposal. It's not what this system is designed for and any such attempts are likely to degrade the experience for human readers while driving up costs for us.

8. Is Encyclia open source? Is it decentralized? Is there a fallback/succession plan?

We are planning to release the Encyclia server software as free and open source when it is stable. During this early testing phase, we would prefer to avoid external instances popping up, since given the early stage of the implementation, deployments without close supervision could cause various kinds of unintended harm. Several planned privacy and safety features are either not reliable yet or not present at all, and components interacting with remote APIs still need to be outfitted with checks and boundaries to avoid Encyclia overloading external servers that may cut this software off if it does not respect their rules.

Once version 1.0 is here and the code is open, self-hosted Encyclia instances will be possible. However, since they will be bridging the same centralized ORCID data, it is an open question what value (besides redundancy) they will provide. We could see universities or other research groups using Encyclia's allowlist mode to bridge only a small selection of ORCID records, such as their own members. Single account installations should also be viable in theory, if someone wants to avoid relying on any external services for their science communication needs.

For Encyclia.pub, the big open flagship instance that bridges all of ORCID, there is less immediate value in redundant servers. In the medium term, we would like to ensure that at least two people have administrative access to Encyclia.pub just in case. But even if Encyclia.pub were to go away somehow, the open source release would at least allow the community to build fallback options. As detailed in “What is Encyclia?”, the website does not ordinarily show information from or about individual external ActivityPub accounts, so the community moderation burden of an Encyclia server is effectively zero.

Beyond that, the organizational future of Encyclia will depend in no small part on how it is received and how many people integrate it into their social media consumption. If it turns out to be a niche gimmick for a handful of enthusiasts, we will keep running it as a hobby project. If thousands of academics start to rely on it for their work, then we are more than open to the possibility of handing it off to an actual participatory governing body, whether that is ORCID itself, another existing institution in the Fediverse or the academic community, or something completely new.

9. Why not combine efforts with Open Science Network?

The Open Science Network is a project by the Bonfire team to assemble a Fediverse platform geared towards academic use cases – science communication, scientific collaboration, and academic self-administration. At a glance, there is a good amount of feature overlap, in particular with their ORCID integration.

We talked with the Bonfire team in early 2024 about their vision and goals for OSN. Their project is working towards being the best possible Fediverse “home” for academics, collecting all the necessary affordances under its umbrella, and is thus particularly appealing for researchers who may not have a Fediverse presence yet or who were dissatisfied with Mastodon. Meanwhile, Encyclia aims to be a collection of auxiliary tools (mostly automated accounts) usable by any academic on the Fediverse, no matter their choice of platform or client, and for that reason it may be more appealing for people who already have a Fediverse “home” that they don't want to leave behind.

It quickly became clear during our discussions that, while we share the goal of enabling and enhancing scientific collaboration and communication on the Fediverse, our strategies are so different that there is little to nothing in the way of technological building blocks that could be sensibly shared. We think of OSN and Encyclia as complementary paths towards the same goal, and we continue to wish the Bonfire team all the best. We are convinced there is ample room for us both.