To achieve our vision of a world where everyone who participates in research is uniquely identified and connected with their affiliations and contributions, we need to establish and maintain meaningful channels of engagement with our diverse community. This includes engaging with researchers about when, how, and why you use your iD and your experience of doing so, as our UX Designer, Mallory Robertson recently explained. We also listen to what you have to say on social media, at events and workshops, and elsewhere. And we actively seek to gather information about users via our regular community surveys and through other research, such as the THOR Study of ORCID Adoption across Disciplines and Locations.
With 2019 being our Year of the Researcher, we have a great opportunity to focus even more of our efforts on understanding your needs, which is why we recently launched our Academia & Beyond project. Working with a global task force of individual researchers and representatives from relevant research organizations, we are focusing first on the arts and humanities community.
We are taking an evidence-based approach to understanding how these communities work, what makes them tick, and how we can better meet their needs — including challenging some common assumptions! For example, the THOR analysis mentioned above showed that proportionately more arts & humanities scholars have an iD than expected based on publication activity; at the same time, these same scholars have proportionately fewer works connected to their ORCID record compared with researchers in other fields. We’d like to better understand how to support the interest in ORCID the arts and humanities community is demonstrating.
During the first phase of Academia & Beyond, we are developing maturity models for ORCID adoption and use in this broad community. This includes identifying the key tools and services they use that have either already integrated with ORCID or could in future; assessing awareness of ORCID among researchers in these fields; and understanding the context for wider ORCID adoption, including major challenges and opportunities.
We are fortunate to be supported in this work by a group of invited participants and community volunteers who have agreed to share their experience and expertise. The Arts & Humanities Task Force, which I am chairing, was launched in May, with the following members:
- Anne Boddington, Kingston University, UK
- Katherine Burton, Taylor & Francis, UK
- Grace Cho, Artrepreneur, USA
- Peter Cornwell, Data Futures, France
- John Cussans, Independent Researcher, UK
- Milena Grass Kleiner, University of Colombia, Colombia
- Siobhann McCafferty, Australian Research Data Commons, Australia
- Poul Melchiorsen, Aalborg University Library, Denmark
- Pierre Mounier, OpenEdition, France
- Jefferson Pooley, Muhlenberg College, USA
- Ellie Porter, Art 360 Foundation, UK
- Karin Wulf, Omohundro Institute/College of William & Mary (ORCID Board member), USA
They are helping us to:
- Recruit researchers in their communities for the user journey project
- Identify appropriate conferences and other events for worthwhile ORCID engagement
- Develop and implement improved messaging about ORCID for their communities
- Identify and address barriers to the use of ORCID in their communities, including making recommendations for new features if needed
- Implement/improve ORCID integrations and/or messaging at their own organizations
For more information, please see the Academia & Beyond Task Force web page.
Get involved!
Based on what we learn from this approach, we plan to launch a second task force later this year, which will focus on clinical medicine/science; please let us know if you’re interested in participating. You can also help by sharing information about key systems and platforms used by arts & humanities scholars that could or should implement ORCID, or whose current integration could be improved. And everyone is welcome to join the conversation on our Friends of ORCID Slack workspace!
We look forward to sharing more with you as this project progresses – and thank you!
