Jisc UK ORCID Support – anniversary briefing

From Nicky Ferguson, project manager.

The first formal meeting for the UK ORCID support project happened on March 1st 2016.  So I thought it would be good to make a very informal list of things we have discovered, things which seem to be important to our community and things we need to be doing from now on.  The consortium now has 79 members ( … and counting!).  All these institutions have access to the advantages of ORCID premium membership and dedicated UK-based support.  We have also held a number of very well-attended face to face events where we have brought together key ORCID technical staff, end users, strategists and planners to share ideas and work towards overcoming obstacles.

Things we’ve heard / what people would like

1. Easy headcount for staff/students with ORCID IDs (different institutions have different reasons but this is by far the most often requested, especially by institutions who don’t yet have an integration). ¹
2. Easy end-user  registration from within institutional infrastructure.
3. Signing in to ORCID via social media (now done – you can sign in via Facebook or Google+).
4. Signing in to ORCID using institutional ID (now done).
5. ORCID and monographs – get ORCID IDs used and into workflow.
6. CRIS providers to provide easy two way integration.
7. Publishers’ submission systems to gather ORCID IDs of all authors and collaborators. ²
8. Case study for integrating into reporting to funders (e.g. REF, HESA).
9. Case study for researcher moving institutions to illustrate benefits to the researcher and the institution related to:
10. Getting ORCID IDs into HR systems, early integration of new members of staff.
11. Adoption of ORCID by existing and emerging peer review systems. ³
12. Small journal publishers – rather than pushing specifically for ORCID use, a joint initiative to make it easier for them to move towards DOIs, ORCIDs ⁴; 
13. Funders to use and ask for ORCID IDs in their processes.  Researchers to engage with these systems even when initially the benefits seem some way off.
14. More widespread use and recognition of ORCID IDs in signatures, social media profiles, Wikipedia entries, business cards, citations and slide presentations.

What we intend to do to help the above happen

• Continue to bring the community together virtually and face to face to encourage information sharing, identification of obstacles and solutions and sharing of ideas.  Past examples include:
  • our Use Cases and API workshop
  • our ORCID API Hackday, video interviews of attendees, video of presentations from breakout groups
  • our recent onboarding webinar.
• Continue to work with specific institutions and user communities to clarify and help address issues which are impeding integration.  Continue to illustrate and encourage the implementation of best practice. Past examples include:  
  • our Guidance for Managers/Practitioners, Guidance for Developers and Guidance for Strategic Managers/Directors.
  • Thinking about ORCID? our step-through decision-making diagram with supporting documentation at each stage to help technologists and strategists to make the right decisions at the right time.
  • Specific sections analysing Eprints, DSpace and Hydra on Fedora in the context of ORCID’s Collect and Connect framework.
• Promote more widespread understanding of the advantages of authoritative assertion. ⁵  For example, rather than an individual researcher saying “I work at xyz institution, I have received funding awards from abc and I have published in jkl journal”, those assertions are marked as approved by the correct authority i.e. made by the institution, the publisher and the funder.

Things to collaborate on to promote ORCID use internationally

• A “registration app”.  Many institutions have not (yet) achieved an ORCID integration for a variety of reasons.  An app may allow them to move towards ORCID and towards their researchers who are already using or wanting to use ORCID IDs.  2 key things institutions want:
  • to collect the ORCID IDs of staff who have already registered;
  • to collect the ORCID IDs of staff who register through the app.
    A registration app would help institutions achieve these following best practice, through the authentication of users with ORCID.
• A coordinated approach to suppliers of CRIS, repository, profile, peer review and funder and publisher submission systems.  A primer to show what is required for suppliers to enable their systems for unique identifiers in general and ORCID in particular.
• A similar programme of specific points of action which could reasonably be asked of publishers.  It would be very helpful, for example, if publishers require and gather ORCID IDs for all authors, including co-authors, put them into the DOI metadata and then pass the relevant metadata on to ORCID, Crossref and DataCite.

Heads Up

We are planning our next Consortium Event in May or June 2017.  This will be another opportunity for you to talk to each other and to key ORCID staff, to share experiences, learn what is on the horizon and represent the interests, concerns and needs of your institution and your individual researchers.  More information available soon.

Footnotes
<sup>1.   See the use case and the video of Helen Cooper’s presentation (5.45 in to the video).↩
2.   Major publishers have committed to requiring ORCID iDs in the publishing process for their journals↩
3.   Peer review and ORCID ↩
4.   ORCID is of course an important part of on-going conversations between Jisc and publishers about the key pieces of information required to support Open Scholarship↩
5.   Managing assertions↩</sup>

Other links

More about the UK consortium, how to join

More about past and future events in the UK