ORCID and Humanities: Celebrating the New Year with New Work Types

New work types support arts and humanities

We have added 13 new work types, many of which allow arts and humanities scholars to claim credit for their work:

1. Design: Plans, drawing or set of drawings showing how something e.g. building, product is to be made and how it will work and look.
2. Image: A visual representation other than text, a still image.
3. Moving image: A moving display, either generated dynamically by a computer program or formed from a series of pre-recorded still images imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession.
4. Sound: A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
5. Musical composition: Musical composition can refer to an original piece of music, the structure of a musical piece, or the process of creating a new piece of music.
6. Blog post: A piece of writing or other item of content published on a blog.
7. Conference presentation: A set of slides containing text, tables or figures, designed to communicate ideas or research results, for projection and viewing by an audience at a conference, symposium, seminar, lecture, workshop or other gatherings.
8. Conference proceedings: Conference proceedings is the official record of a conference meeting. It is a collection of documents which corresponds to the presentations given at the conference. It may include additional content.
9. Clinical study: A work that reports on the results of a research study to evaluate interventions or exposures on biomedical or health-related outcomes. The two main types of clinical studies are interventional studies (clinical trials) and observational studies. While most clinical studies concern humans, this publication type may be used for clinical veterinary articles meeting the requisites for humans.
10. Learning object: Teaching material. A resource requiring interaction from the user to be understood, executed, or experienced. Examples include forms on Web pages, applets, multimedia learning objects, chat services, or virtual reality environments.
11. Cartographic Material: Any material representing the whole or part of the earth or any celestial body at any scale. Cartographic materials include two- and three-dimensional maps and plans (including maps of imaginary places); aeronautical, navigational, and celestial charts; atlases; globes; block diagrams; sections; aerial photographs with a cartographic purpose; bird’s-eye views (map views), etc
12. Transcription: A written record of words spoken in court proceedings or in a speech, interview, broadcast, or sound recording.
13. Public Speech: (new work type; not mapped to COAR.) An oral presentation of information to the public. Including talks, interviews and podcasts.

We also improved the overall experience of selecting work types

In addition to adding new work types, we have refined some of the existing types to decrease confusion where they seemed redundant or unclear to users, mapping them to the COAR vocabulary wherever possible. The types that have been merged or refined to map to COAR are:

• Conference abstract: Replaced with the more general ‘conference output’ (from COAR);
• Edited book: Replaced with ‘book’ (closest equivalent from COAR). This type was confusing because “edited book” is a role or an action; “book” is a resource.
• Lecture/speech:  Replaced with ‘lecture’ for academic talks (from COAR) and  ‘public speech’ for dissemination activities (new work type);
• Manual and Test:  Replaced with ‘learning object’ (from COAR, and which is labeled ‘teaching materials’ in English);
• Technical standards:  Replaced by ‘report’ (from COAR).

We have also deprecated a few types that have proved to have low usage from our community, which means they are no longer available to select in the My ORCID page. However, due to compatibility considerations, they are still supported by our APIs. We have deprecated the following work types:

• Newsletter article: Deprecated due to low usage and no equivalent COAR type. Instead, we recommend using ‘magazine’ or ‘newspaper article’ types;
• Disclosure: Deprecated due to low usage and generally incorrect usage;
• Spin off company: Deprecated due to low usage and no equivalent COAR type.

ORCID members can add new types of data via the Member API

Like most data found in an ORCID record, works data is added in two distinct ways:

1. Automatically, by an ORCID member using the ORCID API, or
2. Manually, by the researcher directly via their My ORCID page.

The ability to add data to ORCID records via the ORCID API is an exclusive member benefit, and we encourage our member organizations to add authoritative data that they hold about researchers on their behalf. Not only does this reduce researchers’ administrative burden, but it adds a trust marker to the data that can be used in integrity checks in workflows such as the submission of grant applications.

An ORCID member organization wishing to make use of the new work types must be using Member API 3.0 or higher, and will need to update their integration to re-map their internal classifications to the new ORCID work types. This will allow them to not only add these new types of Works data to researchers’ records, but they will also be able to update Works they may have previously categorized as “Other.”

Of course, if you are a researcher, we welcome you to log into your record and see for yourself what new kinds of Works data you — or your organization — can now add to your record!

Arts and humanities Works have been historically underrepresented in ORCID records

Over the years, scholarly communities focused on the arts and humanities have provided us with the feedback that, while they appreciate the concept of ORCID and understand the promise of ORCID records, in practice they found them to be of limited use. Though we have 151 million works in the ORCID registry, associated with 6.7 million researchers, non-STEM outputs have historically been underrepresented at least in part due to the lack of appropriate work types by which to classify them.

Humanities-focused researchers who wished to add previously unsupported types of works to their records were limited to selecting the “Other” category, which had the unfortunate side effect of “othering” their work, or making it seem as if their research outputs were not as valued as other STEM-centric outputs, such as journal articles. ORCID certainly doesn’t see it this way, though we sympathize with the perspective of frustrated humanities scholars. The work required to rectify this properly involved careful planning and, of course, the involvement of our community, which is why we invited your input in this blog post from last July that outlined a proposal for the new work type scheme.

Mapping to a community-maintained vocabulary

In creating a new set of work types that are as useful as possible to the widest range of users, ORCID didn’t want to reinvent the wheel; we prefer to re-use existing community taxonomies wherever possible. So we sought out the best available taxonomy to ensure the new categories we offered would be as interoperable as possible, over time, across a broad spectrum of systems in the research community.

After reviewing several candidates, we have aligned our new work types to the Controlled Vocabularies for Repositories — a living standard rigorously maintained by experts with a commitment to sustainability through the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). We chose the COAR vocabulary based on a multitude of criteria: mappability, coverage, suitability for our use case, status of and commitment to maintenance, as well as interoperability.

New work types mean new possibilities for ORCID, and for our community

The addition of these new humanities-based work types is a long-awaited development both for ORCID and for our community, and we are excited to discover the use cases that our expanded support will catalyze. We invite you to explore the new types of works available in ORCID records:

• For a full list of the work type that ORCID now supports, visit our FAQ.
• If you’re one of ORCID’s member organizations and you would like to add these new work types data to your researchers’ records—and you are using API 3.0 or higher—you will need to update your integration. Reach out to your engagement lead at support.orcid.org if you need help or advice.
• If you’re a researcher, log in to your record and explore the new options under the Works section of your record.