Have you signed up to ORCID Research Connect?

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Connect more researchers with your institutional integrations.

What is ORCID Researcher Connect?

Do you often wonder if you have researchers who have ORCID records but are not yet connected to your institutional systems? Researcher Connect is an initiative from ORCID to reach out to researchers and help give your organisation’s connections with ORCID records a boost.

In a nutshell, Research Connect works like this:

  1. Eligible researchers will automatically get a notification to connect to their home institution
  2. They will be directed to a landing page that you provide, with information on ORCID and a link to your system
  3. The researcher clicks on the link and completes the connection workflow
  4. If the researcher gives permission, your institutional system can then push affiliation information to their record
The image shows an overview of the process for researcher connect. the text is in 4 blocks and reads: Identification ORCID uses your institutional email domains to find unconnected researchers with a verified domain on their record. Notification These researchers receive notifications inviting them to connect with your institution. Connection The notification directs researchers to your institutional ORCID landing page, to sign in and authorize the connection. Follow-up If they don’t connect, a reminder is sent 30 days later.
The 4 steps in Researcher Connection

Which organisations can take part?

ORCID member organisations with an active integration can take part.  This means that you need to have a connected institutional system (commonly your CRIS or Repository) which can send affiliations (write to the ORCID record).

What will you need?

  • Your ORCID integration will need to be active i.e. can send affiliation information to the researcher’s ORCID record
  • You must provide a clear webpage that explains the benefits of connecting and provides a direct link to your integration. You can discuss and update this with ourselves or ORCID.
  • You provide ORCID with a list of the relevant institutional domains (e.g. variations on your @emaildomain.ac.uk) so that ORCID targets the correct researchers.

What will it look like for the researcher?

Researchers will get a notification to their ORCID inbox (and directly to their email if their orcid notification settings enable this). They then need to click the link and complete the authorisation and authentication workflow (which links up with your institutional system).  See the screenshot in ORCID’s blog post and sample text as sent to the researcher in the documentation page.

Researchers get an automatic notification if they have a ‘verified domain’ for example @yourInstitution.ac.uk

If they don’t respond, they get a reminder after 30 days.

Screenshot shows the message sent to an ORCID researcher to alert them to a relevant integration. Text inside the screenshot reads: There is a button to connect to the University of Oxford.
Example message to a researcher inviting them to connect with their University integration

What should you do next?

  • You should have received an email from ORCID inviting your organisation to activate researcher connect (if your integration meets the criteria)
  • For our members, we held a meeting in our Advocacy and Engagement series on 24th February with a speaker from Imperial College sharing their experience as a pilot in researcher connect. You can find the recording in the Events section in our Teams Community Space.
  • Read the resources from ORCID below to find out more. We also have a set of slides we can share with you.
  • Get in touch with us via [email protected] for more information and support with getting ready e.g. help with reviewing your researcher pages to meet the criteria.

Researcher Connect can help to boost the number of researchers that become visible to your Institutional system integrated with ORCID, and enable you to make a trusted connection which appears in the researcher’s record, showing your institution as employer in their affiliation field. Get in touch and take the next step to get Researcher Connect working for you. Very positive results in numbers of connected researchers have been reported so far, and we can link you up with the other members who have taken advantage of this new featured offered by ORCID since earlier this year.

ORCID Blog Post

ORCID Documentation Page