Report: ORCID UK Regional Meetings – NW England

The first UK ORCID Regional Meeting was held at the University of Salford on the 6th of February. These meetings have been organised in response to requests from our members to hold shorter, more focussed consortium meetings for groups so that they can be easily attended.

The meeting began with introductions from the attendees who each gave us one pressing issue or interesting fact about ORCID at their institution. In this short session we learnt that:

• Almost every member of academic staff at Bolton has an ORCID iD
• At UCLan they include ORCID in standard wording emails e.g. when asking academics for Author Accepted Manuscripts / contacting new starters to advise them about the team and the work that they do
• LJMU has completed work to build a crosswalk from Symplectic Elements to add ORCID iD into their HR system to satisfy HESA/HERA reporting
• New starters at Huddersfield are introduced to ORCID as part of their induction and with their Pure sign-up are also helped to link to the auto-populate features – so that where automatic updates can occur (such as between Crossref and ORCID) permissions have already been granted

After the introductions and an overview from Adam Vials Moore, Wendy Taylor of Salford University presented on how her small team worked to ensure scholarly outputs are open and visible and the role ORCID played in that. We got a great overview of her work in advocacy, and the technical interactions and issues with eprints and Figshare.  The team have a vision of how they wish to work with their researchers, and Wendy shared with us the statements in that vision around supporting ORCID.

Stephen Carlton then presented on how the University of Manchester embedded ORCID into its Standard Operating Procedures (which is not the same thing as a policy), recommending that all academics

• Claim & connect an ORCID iD
• keep it up to date
• provide it to funders/publishers whenever possible

There was then a discussion around topics that the attendees had suggested – this is part of the flexible and responsive nature of the regional meetings.

• advocacy and clear messaging
• arts and humanities
• HERA and HR systems
• engagement with the registry

During the course of the discussions it also became clear that the community was clearly very focussed on preparations for REF2021 and and there was a clear drive to help researchers being submitted for REF to obtain their ORCID as a priority.

One action that the Jisc support team came away with was some ideas from eprints users for future enhancements for the plugin to discuss with the community  We were also able to spend time helping with specific questions on a 1:1 basis.

Slides from the meeting are available from the ORCID UK Zenodo Community. Notes made during the session and then curated by the attendees are also available.

If you are interested in hosting an ORCID regional meeting please contact us! help@jisc.ac.uk