Open scholarly infrastructure organizations collaborate to navigate the OA research and publishing maze to help solve compliance with emerging requirements.
We are excited to announce the first of a series of planned collaborations between ORCID and the OA Switchboard with the launch of ORCID-enabled smart matching in OA Switchboard. With their April 2022 release, OA Switchboard users will be able to leverage authoritative affiliation data from authors’ ORCID profiles to corroborate affiliation or organizational identifiers (such as ROR or Ringgold IDs) and ensure more accurate routing of the messages being shared between participants throughout the Open Access (OA) research cycle and publication journey, ultimately resulting in more complete and better quality metadata in the OA Switchboard messages for each article published.
As adoption of OA Switchboard increases, we expect further specific use cases in the collaboration with ORCID to emerge, but initially the OA Switchboard is expected to:
- Reduce the burden required to check and confirm research funder and institutional OA requirements, mandates, or agreements, as well as author, article, and license compliance
- Enable publishers to offer a compliant author journey
- Improve internal and external reporting with more complete, higher quality input data
- Enable the fulfillment of OA publication-level arrangements, and
- Match publication costs with publication funds.
The OA Switchboard’s independently managed, shared infrastructure provides a neutral space for the exchange of OA publication metadata. The standardized protocol allows for the transparent exchange of data about OA publications, designed to operate and integrate with all stakeholder systems. It eases the administrative burden of maintaining many-to-many relationships, and managing open access compliance. It also reduces the sheer volume of manual information exchange.
“These [open access] challenges can only be tackled by industry-wide collaboration, interoperability of systems and solutions, and building on existing PIDs like ORCID iD.”
Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director of the OA Switchboard
ORCID and OA Switchboard are well aligned to help simplify the sharing of information about OA publications throughout the entire publication journey
Both OA Switchboard and ORCID are mission-driven, community-led non-profit initiatives designed by and for stakeholders in the research community. OA Switchboard enables research funders, institutions and their libraries and academic publishers, to navigate the OA research and publishing maze. ORCID strives to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. Both OA Switchboard and ORCID understand the challenges publishers, funders and institutions face when implementing new OA agreements and honoring policies and mandates, making them ideal partners to help solve these challenges.
ORCID iDs can help corroborate affiliation data in OA Switchboard and improve smart matching
Most submission systems used by publishers are capable of gathering authors’ ORCID iDs and many publishers and journals have been capturing this well-structured metadata from their authors for several years. However, in many systems affiliation details are still gathered as free text, and associated organizational IDs are often missing, creating a bottleneck in OA Switchboard relays.
“By collaborating with the OA Switchboard, we are delighted to be able to advance our strategic goals of improving value to members and researchers alike by reducing the burden required to administer OA publication journeys and help ensure compliance with OA requirements, mandates and agreements.”
Chris Shillum, Executive Director of ORCID
Since ORCID record holders frequently include authoritative institutional identifiers in the education and employment sections of their ORCID profiles, integrating with ORCID will improve OA Switchboard “smart matching” and result in more messages with more compete, higher-quality metadata being correctly routed through the relays. And as more ORCID consortium members take advantage of ORCID’s recently released Affiliation Manager, a tool that allows organizations to write authoritative affiliation data to ORCID records without the need for a customized integration or IT support, this will only improve over time.
Connecting the PID dots: a scenario of ORCID-enabled smart matching
The newly released functionality is open source and can be used by publishers when they compose and send messages through the OA Switchboard Suggestor API. When a message contains just text for the affiliation data, but includes an ORCID iD for the corresponding author, the feature looks up the affiliation data in the ORCID record and compares it to the institution name in the message. If there is a match, the institutional identifier from the ORCID record will then be used to determine the intended recipient of the message.
Smart Matching
Since ORCID record holders frequently include authoritative institutional identifiers in the education and employment sections of their ORCID profiles, integrating with ORCID will improve OA Switchboard “smart matching” and result in more messages with more complete, higher-quality metadata being correctly routed through the relays.
As an example, a message for the OA Switchboard that contains free-text for both author and affiliation data (“UvA”, which is an abbreviation for the University of Amsterdam)—with no identifier for either researcher or institution—cannot be delivered to the intended recipient because there is no definitive data to work with.
However, if that same message has an ORCID iD for the corresponding author, the OA Switchboard smart matching module can look up the ORCID record to see if it contains affiliation information with an organizational identifier. In this case, “University of Amsterdam” and ROR ID https://ror.org/04dkp9463. At this point we “connect the dots” between that text affiliation (“UvA” versus “University of Amsterdam”) and the identifier present in the ORCID record, which can then be used to correctly route the message.
Trust markers in new contexts
Partnering with OA Switchboard to help strengthen smart matching represents a new use case for ORCID that highlights the concept of “trust markers” that ORCID introduced recently. Reliable, trustworthy data sources connected via authenticated workflows, as well as the recording and transparent disclosure of the provenance of data present in a record, provides a mechanism for users of the data to judge the veracity and trustworthiness of information in that record for themselves. Making use of ORCID’s core role as a hub of profile data and relationships, OA Switchboard can leverage the intersection of ORCID iDs and organizational IDs as a “trust marker” to corroborate author identity, which ultimately results in messages being shared with a high degree of confidence.
Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director of the OA Switchboard said, “We’re excited about this collaboration as it builds directly on key insights gained in our first operational year, namely that PIDs in article-level metadata are critical for solving real problems, and that there is tension between providing a great author experience and an ‘ideal process’. These challenges can only be tackled by industry-wide collaboration, interoperability of systems and solutions, and building on existing PIDs like ORCID iD.”
Chris Shillum, Executive Director of ORCID said, “As a key part of the open scholarly infrastructure, ORCID has long sought to further the cause of open research. By collaborating with the OA Switchboard, we are delighted to be able to advance our strategic goals of improving value to members and researchers alike by reducing the burden required to administer OA publication journeys and help ensure compliance with OA requirements, mandates and agreements.”
