This post was co-authored by our Asia Pacific Engagement Team members, Chieh-Chih Estelle Cheng, Camillia Lu, Brian Minihan
The past year has been busy for the ORCID Asia-Pacific community. During the second half of 2018, a new APAC Engagement team was born: Brian Minihan, based in Hong Kong, and Camillia Lu and Estelle Cheng in Taiwan. We each have responsibility for specific countries across the region, and we also act as regional liaisons for communications and outreach (Brian), technology and product management (Estelle), and building and maintaining organizational partnership relationships (Camillia).
The new team’s first priority was to establish communications across various APAC community groups through regionally focused roundtable meetings, workshops and blog posts. We recently held our first in-person APAC Engagement team strategy meeting in Hong Kong to reflect on the past and look forward to the future. So now is the perfect time to share with our broader community more on our progress to date and our plans for the rest of this year!
We have identified three different stages of ORCID adoption in research workflows across our region:
- Involvement — organizations that are working to get researchers and institutions involved in linking ORCID iDs to their research works and making them shareable and discoverable through identifiers.
- Engagement — organizations that are communicating with partners with similar interests to build strength through numbers and reduce barriers in sharing research information.
- Consolidation — members who are actively expanding existing connections and integrations in the community.
Involvement
At present, there are three ORCID consortia and 143 ORCID member organizations in the region; we support and interact with them in Cantonese, English, Japanese, and Mandarin.
Asia-Pacific makes up 14% of ORCID’s total membership and 32% of ORCID Registry usage. That usage is represented in the image below by shading – the more users in a country, the darker it appears on the map.
Engagement
We’re keenly focused on helping our community link research through ORCID and other identifiers. For example, Airiti, a prominent e-publishing platform for Chinese-language works, leverages its work registering DOIs and other activities in the persistent identifier community to engage with researchers and other institutions in Taiwan. Their search and link wizard — recommended for those with Chinese-language publications — enables users to quickly and easily import metadata from Airiti Library, including journal papers, proceedings, dissertations, and books. They are building the foundations to eventually link researchers, publishers, institutions, and funders through ORCID integration.
We are proud that our region has one of the highest ORCID member integration rates — roughly 70% of APAC members have at least one integration, with third-party system integrations accounting for about 45% of these.
(106 ORCID integrations in Asia-Pacific by vendor system)
Integration examples via ORCID-enabled systems include:
Custom-built integrations from across the region include:
- Airiti (Taiwan)
- KoreaMed (Korea)
- Social Science Academic Press (China)
- CSIRO ORCID Integration (Australia)
Consolidation
A significant number of initiatives by organizations to consolidate existing connections with ORCID are underway or in the planning process in our region.
The Australian ORCID Consortia Lead organization, Australian Access Federation, a National Research and Education Network (NREN), is undertaking an effort to define success in maturity several years after ORCID adoption nationally. They’re hoping to share their experience and leadership with emerging federated technology organizations, such as in Hong Kong, communicating AAF’s efforts in providing connections, as well as communication and technical resources. Royal Society Te Apārangi, the New Zealand ORCID Consortium Lead organization, works with other global organizations seeking to learn from its centralized NZ Hub ORCID integration, which supports New Zealand researchers looking to connect their funding and publications, and adding that metadata to NZ Hub users’ ORCID records.
Next Steps
In 2019, we’re planning ORCID staff visits to Northeast Asia including China, Japan, and Korea, following a visit to Australia and New Zealand in April/May. We will be holding our next ORCID members Town Hall Meeting on May 31 (morning hours in Asia Pacific). If you’re affiliated with an ORCID member organization, join us to hear more about our regional strategy, financials, and details from the Nominating Committee Chair for the next Board Election. Also look for us at the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity on June 2-5 in Hong Kong and the Crossref Live Kuala Lumpur event on July 8 at the Ministry of Education in Putrajaya, Malaysia.
Building on our success working with publishers and funders, reaching out to research administrators in Asia-Pacific is also a key strategy in 2019. Look out for details of our webinar about ORCID and research management later this year.
We also warmly invite you to participate in our working groups and other community initiatives, including volunteering to help test our user interface — read more in Friends of ORCID.
