The scholarly community is collectively facing a looming crisis as more false research is slipping into publication, threatening the integrity of the scholarly record. Members of the ORCID Senior Team recently devoted a webinar to address how ORCID, and more specifically ORCID member organizations, can help. If you missed the webinar, you can catch the replay here and download the presentation here.
A Multi-layered Approach
At ORCID, we recognize that multiple factors contribute to the crisis in research integrity, including the “publish or perish” pressure that researchers face to advance in their careers, shifts in publishing industry business models through the Open Access transition, some of which risk incentivizing publication volume and speed over quality, and the rise of generative AI tools that reduce the effort it takes to create plausible “fake” research.
“I don’t think there’s any one solution to this problem,” said ORCID Executive Director Chris Shillum. (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1108-3660) “The community needs to take a multi-layered approach.”
This multi-layered approach can be visually explained through the “Pyramid of Trust” (itself adapted from the “Triangle of Trust”, presented earlier in the year at NISOPlus 2024 by Anita De Waard, VP Research Collaborations at Elsevier.
The model describes the multiple layers of validation that should be considered when verifying research outputs. At the base of the pyramid is research integrity and ethics. When a research output can be verified as real, written by identified human researchers with track records and whose conflicts of interest are known, then it allows for a basic foundation of trust to be able to move up the pyramid.
“We believe that knowing who researchers are is an important part of the solution, and this is where ORCID has a key role to play,” said Shillum. But “knowing your researchers” isn’t as simple as it might seem, and solutions that seem straightforward might not work for this use case, for several reasons. For example, a typical government ID, while it validates identity, could be difficult to validate at an international scale, and could be intrusive from a privacy point of view. Instead, we believe that the use of validated aspects of a researcher’s scholarly activities is better suited to a research integrity context because it allows a researcher to demonstrate identity through their professional bona fides.
“We think that things like academic affiliation, their educational record, their previous funding awards, and their previously published works correlate much more strongly with sifting out the good actors from the bad actors, and this is generally information that people make public as part of their scholarly work,” said Shillum. Fortunately, our Community Trust Network allows trusted organizational members of ORCID to add these kinds of information to researchers’ ORCID records, always with the researcher’s permission. We call these organizationally validated items on ORCID Records “Trust Markers.”
Trust Markers in ORCID records can help with a number of issues
ORCID’s Product Director Tom Demeranville (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0902-4386) explained that every item in an ORCID record includes provenance metadata, and items added by member organizations, the Trust Markers, are accompanied by an indicator that highlights that that data came from a validated source. “We really appreciate when research organizations add validated affiliation information to ORCID records,” he said. “Similarly, when publishers add outputs and reviews, that’s really useful. And it’s great when funders add funding information to ORCID records. Together, these validated assertions elevate the level of trust in the system as a whole and benefit everyone else in the community. What we’ve realized is that the level of trust in a record accumulates over time.”
To help visualize trust markers more clearly, ORCID has recently developed a record summary view that can be embedded into various workflows, such as manuscript and grant submission workflows, that surface the trust markers that accompany data asserted by validated sources. The hope is that this can reduce the burden on staff tasked with reviewing and vetting submissions, not to mention the effort on the part of authors and researchers themselves, as their data can automatically be ingested into these systems at the time of submission.
In other words, the trust markers that are present when an ORCID member organization has added a piece of data to an ORCID record start to add up, making it easier to validate the identity of the researcher and their outputs.
ORCID’s organizational members together form our Community Trust Network
ORCID’s Community Trust Network is about elevating trust and integrity across the entire research ecosystem. It depends on every organization in the community taking their share of ownership and responsibility for contributing the authoritative data that they hold about researchers in their corner of the research world.
Even though a lot of people refer to their ORCID records as a “profile,” the data in well-populated ORCID records can be re-used by the almost 5,700 external tools and systems that are integrated with ORCID. So ORCID behaves more like a hub of re-usable profile data. ORCID’S Director of Communications Julie Petro (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4967-747X) explained, “Whatever data is in those records gets propagated throughout all the scholarly systems that researchers interact with, saving them huge amounts of time and effort. This is why it’s so important for us to help our members and other consumers of ORCID data understand more clearly the provenance of that data.”
“Trust markers are present in the ORCID Registry thanks to the efforts of hundreds of ORCID member organizations, because, other than the researchers themselves, only ORCID member organizations are able to add data,” said Petro. This is by design: though ORCID is an open registry, meaning anyone can read and reuse data that has been made publicly available, only organizations who have agreed to our membership terms of service, which commit them to ensuring that data they add is factually accurate, are able to contribute information.
Over time, as more and more members of our Community Trust Network—ORCID member organizations—add validated data to the ORCID Registry, the more trust markers there are in the data, and the more robust the entire scholarly record becomes.
To learn more about how ORCID members are already using trust markers, watch the recording.
Petro reminded participants that no matter how many trust markers there are in an ORCID record, “there will always be perfectly good reasons for researcher to self-assert data: perhaps the organization they are affiliated with doesn’t contribute data yet, or doesn’t exist in the same form anymore, or they’re recording an historical output.”
No matter the reason, ORCID is committed to making it as easy as possible for our member organizations to contribute their trusted data, reducing the need for researchers to add the data themselves. ORCID members benefit from dedicated technical support to assist with integration development or trouble shooting. Other integration accelerators, like ORCID’s Certified Service Providers (CSPs) allow for quick adoption of ORCID with systems that adhere to community-developed best practices for different workflows. This ensures a more consistent user experience for researchers, and ORCID members who use these systems can be confident they are using best practice ORCID integrations to easily add trusted data to their researchers’ records.
To find out who ORCID’s top data contributors are, be sure to watch the recording.
We are encouraged that the notions of cumulative trust and trust markers are beginning to make their way outside of the ORCID community and the larger PID community. ORCID members have a unique opportunity to contribute high-quality data directly to the records of the researchers they are affiliated with, publish, or fund. By doing so, they become active participants in our Community Trust Network—playing an important role in repairing and elevating trust in the scholarly record. the scholarly record.
For further reading about ORCID’s Community Trust model on the ORCID blog, visit:
- Summarizing ORCID Record Data to Help Maintain Integrity in Scholarly Publishing
- Ripeta’s Blended Approach: How Trust Markers Can Support Research Integrity
- A Use Case for Trust Markers in ORCID Records: Streamlining the Credentialing Process
- ORCID Record Summaries–Trust Markers
