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UPDATE 8/18/2020: ORCID is maintaining a travel ban for all staff through to 1 January 2021, with a review of whether to extend this decision at the November 2020 meeting of the Board. The ban covers all international travel and domestic travel would only be approved in line with current health travel warnings.
UPDATE 6/23/2020: We are continuing to monitor the global pandemic and are extending our travel and meeting guidance through August 31, 2020.
UPDATE 5/18/2020: We are continuing to monitor the global pandemic and are extending our travel and meeting guidance, outlined below, through June 15, 2020.
UPDATE 4/06/2020: Based on evolving recommendations across international, national, and state agencies, we are extending our travel and meeting guidance, outlined below, through April 30, 2020. We will continue to monitor the environment and issue an update as the situation develops.
On behalf of ORCID, I am grateful for our global community of members, consortia, and researchers. We recently held our regional Town Halls in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions and got a chance to interact with over 250 members of our community and share our progress and plans, as well as a few of the ways ORCID is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. We have always been a global organization with a distributed virtual office, so the mechanics of our day to day work have been largely uninterrupted. In fact, next week we will be hosting a webinar where ORCID staff will share our remote work approach and experiences. We sincerely hope that this will help as your newly remote teams settle into their new “offices.”
That said, as I am sure is the case in your workplace, ORCID staff have been emotionally affected by new demands imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Managing family, food, and fresh air access and social distancing is, to say the least, challenging. Even working in a virtual office, we are all social animals. My teenagers and I are cooped up in an apartment, trying to manage schedules so my meetings don’t interfere with their online schooling. Some are trying to entertain and/or home school small children. Others on staff, concerned about asthma, haven’t interacted with another human in person in four weeks. Like everywhere, we are managing, but it is rough.
These unprecedented times call on everyone to be patient and work together. I invite you to reach out to me personally if there is a way you think ORCID can help. Should you have concerns regarding active integration projects, or perhaps would like to use this time to focus on working on your integration, our Engagement Team will be available to answer any questions. Please contact our amazing Help Desk and they’ll route your inquiry to the right person.
In peace and solidarity.
3/13/2020: In respect of guidance from the World Health Organization and other authorities about the COVID-19 pandemic, we have asked that all ORCID staff halt out-of-country travel immediately. In addition, instead of in-person meetings, staff will be scheduling only web meetings during this time, even for local events.
This travel and meeting guidance will remain in place until April 15, at which time we will announce adjustments based on new data about the COVID-19 pandemic.
While we are curtailing travel, we do not anticipate any disruption to our day-to-day operations. Since the beginning, ORCID has been a global organization with a highly effective distributed team culture working out of virtual offices on every continent. We are well positioned to continue serving our community during this pandemic. Researchers will be able to access the Registry as normal, member integrations will continue to work as normal, and our support desk remains in operation as normal.
If there is anything our team can do to help, please let us know.
