Building integrity-centric feedback loops between ORCID + Research Exchange

Addressing the research integrity crisis requires everyone

Academic publishing is built upon an assumption of trust that, unfortunately, is increasingly at risk of exploitation by bad actors. With rising pressures and incentives for researchers to “publish or perish,” it is no wonder that there has been a rise in paper mills and academic misconduct in recent years. 

The consequences are significant: precious time and resources are wasted trying to validate and reproduce fraudulent results; those tasked with investigating academic misconduct are under increasing pressure; and public confidence in the ability of research to address the global challenges facing humanity has been significantly eroded.

Establishing trust in identities—allowing publishers to better know their authors—is an important step to regain confidence in processes and outputs, while showcasing the community’s commitment to high-quality, rigorous standards that ensure the right researchers get credit where credit is due. Often, a name and an email address are all it takes to become a potential author or a reviewer in the peer review ecosystem. By clearly identifying and linking researchers, in effect creating integrity-centric feedback loops between various systems, the research community can better trace patterns of behavior over time, making it easier to spot concerning trends, and reveal potential paper mills, citation rings, or unethical editorial practices.

Wiley and ORCID: longtime collaborators

Known and trusted in the community, and widely recognized as an industry standard, ORCID allows publishers to advance research integrity in a joined up, sustainable way. Wiley has been a member of and an instrumental partner of ORCID since 2012. In ORCID’s earliest days, Wiley provided foundational loans which were later graciously forgiven to support ORCID’s Global Participation Program, demonstrating their commitment to ensure the global exchange of knowledge in an equitable way. 

Wiley currently has several integrations with the ORCID Registry, including Wiley – ScholarOne Manuscripts, Connect.science – Atypon, Authorea, Editorial Manager Journals at Wiley, and Wiley Author Services. Between these different touchpoints, Wiley has added more than 365,000 pieces of trusted data, making them one of ORCID’s top contributors of “trust markers” that can in turn be consumed by other external systems, such as funding systems, when researchers submit applications for grants. 

More recently, Wiley developed Research Exchange, a seamless, all-in-one platform designed to efficiently manage submissions, integrity screening, and peer review, and currently supporting over 340 journals. Wiley was one of five pilot partners for ORCID’s Trust Markers Pilot Project in 2023, which resulted in Wiley enabling Research Exchange users to access the validated identity information in ORCID Record Summaries across the submission journey and to be proactive when recognizing integrity issues.

Trust Markers help users of ORCID data visualize provenance

When ORCID announced the Trust Markers program back in 2023, publishers were given a new tool—a Record Summary—to help their editorial teams make informed, contextualized choices when working with users. As one of ORCID’s launch partners for the project, Wiley quickly integrated Record Summaries into the publishing workflow at key touchpoints in the peer review-to-publication journey of their Research Exchange platform. All three Research Exchange modules (Submission, Screening, and Review) are directly integrated with ORCID, allowing users to link and authenticate their own ORCID iDs, screen and assess user Trust Markers in actionable and contextualized ways pre, mid-, and post-peer review, and get a better understanding of the identity and activity of other platform users. 

In the context of an ORCID record, a Trust Marker is any item in that record that has been organizationally validated. In other words, information about that record holder’s affiliations, funding, or publications that have been added by an ORCID member organization (after having been granted permission by that researcher to add data to their record, of course). A Record Summary is an easy-to-read synopsis of all the provenance (i.e. source) metadata—including those accompanied by Trust Markers—found within the contents of the ORCID record. Record Summaries can be embedded into various workflows, such as manuscript and grant submission workflows. 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.

Provenance data has always been present in ORCID records. What’s new is the ability to  easily visualize it with Trust Markers and Record Summaries. In a record with numerous Trust Markers, there may be fewer items that a reviewer or editor needs to double-check, when assessing an author’s scholarly bona-fides during the submission and review process.

ORCID records are commonly referred to as a “profile,” but because the data in them can be re-used by the 5,700+ external tools and systems that are integrated with ORCID, it might be more accurate to describe them as a hub of re-usable data. The data in those records gets propagated throughout all the scholarly systems that researchers interact with, creating integrity-centric feedback loops along the way; all while saving researchers huge amounts of time and effort. 

Trust is a scale that can change over time—“is this author who they say they are… have they always been? Maybe that good actor is now considered a bad one… look what they’ve been up to over the last year?” By establishing a sliding scale of trust, ORCID Trust Markers can help to tease out an evidence-based narrative around a user that’s centered around actual, verifiable activity, or scholarly bona-fides, over time. 

It is critical to note that no matter how many Trust Markers there may be in any given ORCID record, there will always be perfectly good reasons why a researcher might self-assert data, and it is not ORCID’s role to make value judgements about the data contained within records. However, it is ORCID’s role to make the provenance of their data as clear as possible to understand, so that consumers of that data can more easily decide for themselves if it meets the requirements for their specific use case. 

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Trust Markers program is that it’s truly a community-driven solution, centered on the validated information that ORCID members contribute to researchers’ ORCID records. The more trusted parties in the community that contribute data to their researchers’ record—whether they be publishers like Wiley, or funders, or research institutions or universities—the more strong, responsible feedback loops there are to build robustness in the scholarly record as a whole. 

Building these feedback loops in-platform is key to the success of the Trust Markers program. Wiley’s Research Exchange has implemented these both to improve the quality of validated information whilst also making life easier for researchers to participate.

Embedding Trust Markers—and integrity-centric feedback loops—in the submission, screening, and review processes

Publishers know that any process for establishing trust can be operationally costly. As with the implementation of any new process, careful planning is required to ensure information is seamlessly incorporated and easily interpretable by different users. It’s not enough to have the right data points; they need to be placed in the right context for users of a wide range of experience to get value from them. Interoperability and consistency across a myriad of slightly different systems makes this a challenge too. The Trust Markers found in ORCID Record Summaries—now embedded across all Research Exchange modules—are effective because they’re nuanced enough to recognize that different parties will interpret identity through differing lenses, but are clear enough to help users draw quick, human-led conclusions in-workflow without disrupting the editorial experience. 

From a publisher perspective, this helps pivot Wiley’s approach to identity recognition from being reactive to proactive—spotting issues early in the lifespan of a submission and preventing them becoming a problem further downstream. 

Researchers should receive credit for their work and peer review service in a way that other stakeholders across the publishing and scholarly ecosystem can recognize. Not only does this benefit the researchers themselves, but it also creates a feedback loop that can help drive the robustness of the entire scholarly record over time. As an early and ardent supporter of ORCID, Wiley has long contributed their trusted author data into ORCID records. Going forward, reviewers in Wiley journals will also be able to opt-in to directly add reviewer activity to their ORCID profile as well.

These feedback loops are beneficial to users at all points in their careers. For example, early career researchers with fewer publications to their name could update their record with institutional identifiers, but if that institution were to contribute that data on the researcher’s behalf, it could further establish firm grounding. Further, as peer review service can only be added by trusted organizations (in order to maintain the anonymity of reviews), publishers have a unique opportunity to “give back” to researchers—and support early career academics especially—by crediting them for their contributions during the publication process. Writing peer review service to ORCID records not only supports researchers, but it also benefits publishers and funders during the reviewer selection process, by helping them to select suitable reviewers based on their past service and expertise. Ultimately, by vouching for both identity and activity, publishers create additional layers of validation, as well as additional feedback loops. 

Research Exchange at a glance

Current ORCID feature set in Research Exchange

• Current State of ORCID work within Research Exchange
• Fully allow sign-in with ORCID IDs using Wiley Connect SSO
  • Wiley Connect SSO allows any user to add an ORCID ID to their account using verified ORCID Authentication journeys when logging into Research Exchange

Research Exchange Submission

Authors can use and authenticate their ORCID ID (for Submitting as well as Corresponding authors) to make registration and submission smoother for our users

Research Exchange Screening

Research Exchange Screening’s  Author Identity Verification stages display Authors’ ORCID iDs, alongside Trust Markers to allow for detailed, clear author verification processes by our editorial teams, which saves them time and effort.

Research Exchange Review

Research Exchange Review displays Reviewers’ ORCID iDs and Trust Markers to allow for detailed, clear reviewer invitation journeys and processes by our editorial teams.

Connect SSO allows for all users (Authors, Reviewers, Editors, Editorial Staff) to add, update and authenticate ORCID credentials as they see fit.

The future of Research Exchange

• Collect authenticated ORCID iDs from reviewers 
• Add peer review items to reviewers’ ORCID records
• Enable ORCID member organizations to use their own ORCID membership credentials when configuring the system
• Display ORCID credentials for Authors to Editors in Research Exchange Review
• Collect authenticated ORCID iDs from co-authors/collaborators
• Include authenticated ORCID iDs in the metadata passed downstream

Upholding research integrity involves everyone

While there is no one solution to fortify research integrity, it’s clear that the best way forward is together, and collaborations between open, persistent identifiers such as ORCID and publishers such as Wiley serve as an example as to how this can be accomplished. But there are plenty of opportunities for others across the scholarly ecosystem to participate. 

Institutions that are ORCID members, as well as service platforms or providers, have an opportunity—and indeed, a responsibility—to add the trusted data they hold about their researchers to their records, and to set up feedback loops with their organizationally-validated data that can help their users make carefully considered decisions across peer review and other scholarly workflows. Many ORCID member organizations actively educate their users about the value of ORCID to their particular community, and encourage their researchers to sign up for an ORCID record.

If you are a researcher, use your ORCID record as often as you can. Ensure it’s up to date,  enable Auto-Updates, and give permissions to allow publishers and other trusted institutional platforms to add the data they hold about you to your record (they will only be able to do this if they are an ORCID member with an active integration). You can also use your ORCID iD to sign in to any system you encounter that allows for Single Sign On. This will reduce your burden in that workflow by automatically populating the system’s profiles or forms with relevant data from your ORCID record. 

Learn more about Wiley’s Research Exchange here.