The American Chemical Society (ACS) was an early member of ORCID and now has five integrations—four custom and one built on the ScholarOne Manuscript Submission System. To-date, the integration with ScholarOne has helped ACS contribute more than 1.5 million items of data to the ORCID Registry, making it one of the top contributors of trusted data to ORCID records. ScholarOne allows ACS to collect authenticated ORCID IDs of its authors and reviewers and adds peer-review items to the reviewers’ records.
The following interview is with Sarah Tegen, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief Publishing Officer, ACS Publications at the American Chemical Society.
What are the main reasons for your organization adopting ORCID?
ACS has supported ORCID since the beginning. Having unique identifiers for researchers and scholars, so that they will be consistently linked to all of their research activities and institutional affiliations, builds a foundation for trust across the scientific community. For authors, it enables more efficient workflows and resolves ambiguity in the way they are identified, which helps them create an authenticated record of their scholarly publishing. The identifier also helps to simplify and speed up grant applications—something we know is important to researchers. For end users, having unique identifiers improves search accuracy and discoverability.
This integration with ORCID was implemented in 2015. Has anything changed over time?
Over time we’ve seen why it becomes even more important to be able to uniquely identify researchers across platforms, publishers, institutional affiliations, and scientific disciplines. In early 2020, ACS Publications announced that reviewers of ACS journal articles could create an authenticated record of their efforts through ORCID. ACS also publishes more journals and more articles now than it did in 2015, and we continue to see tremendous growth in global submissions of papers.
What technical or communications challenges did you face along the way? How did you overcome them?
The process requires validation and passing information to a number of platforms. We had to update our content schema, content processes, and article rendering to support and display ORCID identifiers. To get into the details a bit, it works like this: The corresponding authors supply their ORCIDs during the manuscript submission process. To validate that the ORCID belongs to the author, they are required to authenticate by logging into their record. These ORCID values, along with a “validated” flag, are passed along to article production upon acceptance. These ORCIDs, along with other author information, are used to create author identity tags within our content XML, and those tags are included in the PDF and HTML versions of the articles. The ORCIDs also are included in the metadata feeds sent to Crossref and other third parties. CHORUS and other metadata consumers make use of the ORCIDs from there.
How have you seen researchers benefiting by contributing data about their peer review activities to their records?
We’ve already talked about the importance of researchers being able to create a record of their work. Another way that researchers and their institutions can benefit is through improved compliance with reporting requirements from funding agencies. For example, the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-33), issued in 2021 by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, specified requirements to strengthen and standardize disclosure requirements for federally funded awards. Those requirements included digital persistent identifiers.
And of course, any tools that can help address the problem of fraudulent research papers are important for the entire scientific community.
What other ways has ORCID helped you in your processes?
We use ORCIDs within our author name change process as a method of authenticating the request. Additionally, the cross-publisher initiative CHORUS, which operates in cooperation with a number of U.S. federal funding agencies, leverages ORCIDs in its dashboards to promote traceability in open science. Lastly, our internal data analytic processes use ORCID to disambiguate and deduplicate author names during data collection.
Do you have any recommendations you would like to share with other organizations that are planning to adopt ORCID?
Collect authenticated iDs! In other words, require authentication to ORCID.org when accepting ORCID values; do not just supply an ORCID “text box” to fill in. Authentication reduces the likelihood of making errors and makes it harder to misuse the system. It also leverages the power of data interoperability made possible by the integration in the first place, reducing burden on the part of researchers and ensuring the sharing of high quality data.
Learn more about trust markers and their importance in the blog Trust Markers: Interpreting the trustworthiness of an ORCID record. Numerous case studies can also be found on the ORCID blog search results for Community Trust Network .
Contributor
Sarah Tegen, PhD
Sarah Tegen, PhD, is the Senior Vice President and Chief Publishing Officer, ACS Publications at the American Chemical Society. She leads the development of ACS’s pre-eminent portfolio of ninety hybrid and open access journals, oversees the award-winning news magazine Chemical & Engineering News, manages the development of the ACS books program, and heads strategic planning and relationship development in Asia. Dr. Tegen began her career as an acquisitions editor at the National Academy of Sciences (US). She is an alumna of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Tegen serves as Chair of the Board of the STM Association, STM’s Research Integrity Governance Board, and the ChronosHub Board. She is co-chair of the Circles Board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Tegen previously served as Co-Chair of the Association of American Publishers Journals’ Committee and as the President of the Council of Science Editors.
