A national ORCID Hub – sharing experience and developments from New Zealand
What is the New Zealand ORCID Hub – and do we need something similar in the UK?
Join us for a webinar and a working session at the upcoming ORCID member’s meeting to learn about the New Zealand ORCID Hub and to feed into a discussion on the need for a UK equivalent.
What is a national ORCID Hub?
A national ORCID Hub consists of a web application that mediates between researchers, research organisations, and ORCID, facilitates the creation of authoritative affiliations, and manages the process of obtaining permissions from individual researchers and storing access tokens for later use. The New Zealand ORCID Hub is underpinned by a small collection of well-designed services that enable research organisations to create their own integrations directly with ORCID, if they wish to do so. Using the ORCID Hub, all research organisations, large and small, can integrate with ORCID and gain access programmatically to ORCID data and functionality. While each research organisation could deploy its own ORCID integration portal, an ORCID Hub can avoid this duplication of effort, making the benefits of ORCID accessible effectively and easily to all research organisations, including smaller organisations that would otherwise be unable to establish their own ORCID integration portal.
Jisc wishes to explore and scope the feasibility of a UK ORCID Hub using the New Zealand ORCID Hub as a starting point. As a first step the New Zealand Hub will be introduced to the UK ORCID consortium members and others in the community through a webinar at the start of June, and a follow-on session held at the end of June will provide opportunities for potential users of a UK Hub to share initial feedback.
The webinar (5th June 2018)
The webinar will provide an opportunity to learn about the New Zealand Hub, explore its functionality and understand its potential role in institutional and national infrastructure when used to connect to the ORCID API. Matt Buys, Membership Director, ORCID will give a brief introduction to the ORCID API and explain the rationale for a national Hub and how it fits into ORCID’s vision for identifier infrastructure. Jason Gush, Royal Society, New Zealand, will then provide a demo of the ORCID Hub developed for the New Zealand ORCID consortium After attending the webinar, participants will have a better understanding of the New Zealand Hub, how it came about and how it is being used in a national context to assist institutions to make the most of their ORCID membership.
After participating in the webinar, we would like attendees to consider if there is a role for a national ORCID Hub in their own organisation, and to provide initial feedback using the New Zealand hub as a starting point for discussion and suggestions. Potential users of a national UK hub are invited to take part in an event session on the 28th June during the annual UK ORCID consortium members meeting. Participants will gain further knowledge of the Hub and input by discussing their requirements in the context of their organisation.
The webinar will be recorded and made available after the event.
Note: although the webinar is intended to help with preparation for the event session later on in June, anyone else with an interest in a national ORCID Hub is also welcome to attend. If demand is high, preference may be given to UK ORCID consortium members and potential members and registration may be closed early due to demand.
Member’s event parallel session (28th June 2018)
Registration (coming soon – please check our events page)
The session is aimed at potential users of the hub: e.g. smaller organisations that would otherwise be unable to establish their own ORCID integration portal, institutions that want to consider using a hub for portions of their audience not currently catered for by their existing systems, or that are looking to expand their institutional infrastructure with additional ORCID ‘plumbing’. During the event session, participants will explore the functionality of the hub, give feedback on how well this matches their needs and start working on documenting what other requirements would be essential or desirable. We request that all attendees attend the webinar or watch the recording as a pre-requisite, to obtain an overview and understanding of the Hub, prior to attending the session, so that time in the session can be spent capturing requirements.
Update July 2019 A new video by Royal Society Te Apārangi, New Zealand’s ORCID Consortia lead organisation, about their NZ Hub and how research institutes use it.