Alternatives to immediate ORCID systems integration
The value of adopting the use of ORCID in one or more systems is unlikely to be self-evident for every institution – there will be other priorities, especially where the institution is not research intensive, or where the institution has a preference to wait for early adopters to experiment and for best practice to be established before initiating implementation.
Some alternative courses of action are available to institutions that decide not to go ahead with immediate systems integration of ORCID, each with relative pros and cons. Other available options that should be considered include:
- Conduct stakeholder research into awareness, interest and value
- Encourage Researchers to sign up individually – see University of Glasgow for example (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/enlighten/orcid/)
- Building on (2), encourage broad use of ORCIDs to identify the individual and link the university to all types of professional output, such as teaching content and presentations
- Wait for ORCID to become more embedded in institutional and research expectations and practice
- Wait for ORCID to be mandated in funding or statistical data collection
- Wait for ORCID functionality to be implemented by key institutional systems
Options 1-3 represent potentially valuable and complementary steppingstones towards future opportunities that should also be valued by academic staff. Options 4-6 represent a watching brief, for which some ownership is required if the university is to act when the time is right.
| Option | Pros | Cons |
| 1 – Conduct research into awareness, interest and value amongst senior managers, researchers and institutional services | Positive research outcomes may provide a clearer view on rationale, on advocacy needs and on where to implement | For researchers, it is hard to envisage a meaningful set of questions beyond the basic |
| This activity may in itself be awareness raising | That may also be the case for senior leaders | |
| 2 – Encourage Researchers to sign up individually | Early effort can go in to advocacy rather than systems developments | Researchers who sign up individually may not be clearly affiliated with the university, so this involves the time consuming downstream step of capturing that affiliation |
| ORCID information available to the university will be incomplete | ||
| 3 – Encourage broad use of ORCIDs to identify the individual and link the university in all professional output | This will build up the critical mass of content that points back to the individual and to the university | Bear in mind that those ORCIDs may point to a wide variety of un-reviewed work – not just premium research |
| Attaching an ORCID to all professional output, not just research, like a signature, builds habit and grows the network of connected resources | ||
| 4 – Wait for ORCID to become more embedded in institutional and research requirements | If and when take up is widespread, it will become easier to implement in terms of systems and cultural recognition | The lack of such an ID may inhibit other agendas such as identifying all research outputs and promoting research reputation |
| There will be lost opportunity to build momentum as researchers with ORCIDs join from other institutions | ||
| 5 – Wait for ORCID to be mandated in funding or statistical data collection | A strictly pragmatic approach involving no unnecessary effort | Playing catch up in terms of advocacy and capturing individually registered ORCIDs is likely to be challenging |
| 6 – Wait for ORCID functionality to be implemented by key institutional systems | Successful implementation needs to be embedded in key institutional systems | Vendors can be slow to respond even to community pressure, so this option may be too open-ended and ‘work arounds’ should be reviewed |