As 2020 draws to a close, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on my appreciation for the ORCID community and for the ORCID team. This has certainly been a challenging year for everyone, for an endless variety of reasons.
Our community’s commitment to ORCID’s mission—to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers and their contributions—and their unfailing willingness to stay engaged with us as we have navigated through multiple transitions this year have inspired each and every one of us in the global ORCID family. I am aware that many of our members are facing significant financial stress and uncertainty due to the global pandemic, and I am extremely grateful for your ongoing support.
When I joined the team just a few months ago, ORCID was in the midst of taking a step back to assess where it stood after reaching financial breakeven in 2019 and was busy setting the necessary foundations to launch us into our next chapter. And yet, through all of this, the ORCID team has made significant progress on all fronts:
- 181 New integrations
- 11 Service Providers certified
- 107 New members
- Two new consortia
- 134 hosted and/or participated events
- 20 article and/or blog contributions
- Beta-test of our Affiliation Manager
- Reimagined on-demand Member reporting
- Faster registry
- Updates to our user interface, with an eye toward accessibility
- Complete website and Member documentation overhaul
- 38,100 Twitter Followers (an increase of 21% over 2019)
- And one major milestone, passed late in 2020: 10 million ORCID iDs!
I am proud of the work the ORCID team has accomplished while shouldering the unique challenges we are all familiar with this year: familial and economic hardships wrought by the global pandemic, social unrest, and political upheaval in many parts of the world. And I’d particularly like to thank ORCID’s Senior Team: Tom Demeranville, Sarah Hershberger, Julie Petro, Will Simpson, and Ivo Wijnbergen for keeping the train on the tracks during the organization’s first leadership transition since being founded.
I said back in October that my first priority as Executive Director is to listen to our community—to researchers, to members, and to staff. We have just kicked off a listening project with members that includes in-person interviews and will be backed up by a survey that we will be sending to members in January. Following on that, we will be embarking on a similar project with researchers in the first half of 2021. All of this is to better understand what you all think is working, what’s not working, and how we can provide more value to our stakeholders.
And I am listening to staff; we recently completed our first-ever staff culture survey that will inform us about how to grow and change internally to meet the needs of employees as we mature as an organization. We promised the team that if 95% of them responded, ORCID would be making a company donation to a charity based on the input of staff. I am proud that we surpassed our goal and will be making a donation to help children everywhere via UNICEF.
As we reach the end of this tumultuous year, I’d like to wish you, your colleagues, and your family a safe, healthy end to 2020 and lots of positivity as we enter the new year together. We look forward to serving you in 2021!