Researchers can demonstrate their competence in areas such as research ethics, open science, regulatory oversight, research administration, and other topics through accreditation.
Certificates, badges and other qualifications can be added to ORCID records so that the evidence of competence is publicly available and unambiguously linked to an ORCID iD. These qualifications can then be used to access restricted datasets, prove that training has been completed or perform other privileged actions.
There are two general ORCID workflows for qualification information; adding Qualifications to ORCID records, and reading Qualifications in order to make access decisions.
Adding qualifications
- When signing up for an online course, or on completion of the course, the participant is asked to sign into the qualification provider with their ORCID iD.
- The participant is asked to authorize (or deny) access for the qualification provider to read and update their record
- The qualification provider system adds a qualification item to the participants ORCID record using the ORCID API.
ORCID has a separate section in the ORCID record to record information about qualifications, accreditation, certificates and badges.
Each qualification item will always contain:
- The qualification title
- The provider’s Organisation ID (e.g. ROR ID)
- The date it was added to the ORCID record
- Who added the qualification (the source)
They may contain:
- The validity date, including an end date if the qualification expires
- The qualification persistent ID, identifying the type of qualification gained.
- The qualification URL, which contains human readable description of the type of qualification earned.
- The qualification persistent ID. This should link to an online version of the qualification certificate. This could be an existing unique ID or simply a URI.
Reading qualifications
If a service is interested in the qualifications earned by a researcher then you can read them from their record. This information can then be used to prove the ownership of a particular qualification.
- The service asks the researcher to sign into their service with their ORCID iD.
- The participant is asked to authorise (or deny) access for the service to read their record.
- The service uses the ORCID API to read the qualifications section of the ORCID record.
- The service may want to check who added the qualification item to the ORCID record (the source) to make sure it is a source they trust. The source of the qualification could be either:
- The service itself,
- Another ORCID member organization,
- The researcher themselves.
More information
The ORCID record is divided into individual sections to make reading the record faster and more consistent. You can first call a section to receive its summary, and then call using an individual item’s put code to receive robust information on that item.
A table of the summary sections that you can use the API to read are set out below.
| Endpoint | Description |
| /record | Summary view of the full ORCID record |
| /person | Biographical section of the ORCID record, including through /researcher-urls below |
| /summary | Summary view of validated and self asserted items on the ORCID record (only available with the member API) |
| /address | The researcher’s countries or regions |
| The email address(es) associated with the record | |
| /external-identifiers | Linked external identifiers in other systems |
| /keywords | Keywords related to the researcher and their work |
| /other-names | Other names by which the researcher is know |
| /personal-details | Personal details: the researcher‚s name, credit (published) name, and biography |
| /researcher-urls | Links to the researcher‚s personal or profile pages |
| /activities | Summary of the activities section of the ORCID record, including through /works below. |
| /educations | Education affiliations |
| /employments | Employment affiliations |
| /fundings | Summary of funding activities |
| /peer-reviews | Summary of peer review activities |
| /works | Summary of research works |
| /research-resources | Summary of research resources |
| /services | Summary of services |
| /qualifications | Summary of qualifications |
| /memberships | Summary of memberships |
| /distinctions | Summary of distinctions |
| /invited-positions | Summary of invited positions |
There are two different update scopes – one for biographical details, the other for activities.
| Scope | Description | API endpoints |
| /person/update | Biographical data-the left column of the ORCID record user interface. | /address /external-identifiers /keywords /other-names /researcher-urls |
| /activities/update | Research activity data-the right column of the ORCID record user interface. | /distinction /distinctions /education /educations /employment /employments /funding /fundings /invited-position /invited-positions /membership /memberships /peer-review /peer-reviews /qualification /qualifications /research-resource /research-resources /service /services /work /works |
As we continue to develop our products, there are a number of features that are only available with API 3.0 which is our latest and default API version.
The table below provides a short description of each feature. If you have any questions regarding any of the features or upgrading to 3.0 then please reach out to your Engagement Lead or your Consortia Lead.
| Ability to read and write all affiliation types (membership, service, invited positions, distinctions, and qualifications are not available with previous versions of the API) |
| Ability to read and write Research Resources. |
| Ability to read and write work identifiers with relationship type ‘Funded By’. This is used to link Grant or Proposal IDs to work metadata. |
| Ability to read and write work identifiers with relationship type ‘Version of’. This is used to link other versions of the work together. An example use case would be linking the preprint and the published article. |
| Ability to read and write CRediT roles within works metadata. |
| Ability to read the additional source fields common:assertion-origin-client-id and common:assertion-origin-name for affiliations added by the ORCID member portal and works added by search and link wizards. |
| Ability to read and write works with work type of: annotation blog-post cartographic-material clinical-study conference-output conference-presentation conference-proceedings data-management-plans design dissertation-thesis image moving-image musical-composition preprint physical-object public-speech sound transcription review |
| Ability to read and write external IDs for affiliations. |
| Organization IDs are mandatory for adding affiliations and funding to ORCID records. |
| Formalizing Identifiers – We introduced a new system-generated field, which expresses external identifiers (DOIs, PMCID, PMID, ArXiv, Bibcode, ISSNs, and ISBNs) in a normalized format for the purposes of matching and grouping. Normalization is done based on the rules of the identifier type, and may include setting all alpha characters to lowercase, or transforming spaces, dashes, periods and other characters that can be treated as equivalent. It also adds standard prefixes and suffixes as appropriate. For example, https://doi.org/10.1/123, 10.1/123, and https://dx.doi.org/10.1/123 will all appear in this field as https://doi.org/10.1/123. The existing identifier value is unmodified. |
More detailed information can be found here.
ORCID has a separate section in the ORCID record to record information about qualifications, accreditation, certificates and badges.
Each qualification item will always contain:
- The qualification title
- The provider’s Organisation ID (e.g. ROR ID)
- The date it was added to the ORCID record
- Who added the qualification (the source)
They may contain:
- The validity date, including an end date if the qualification expires
- The qualification persistent ID, identifying the type of qualification gained.
- The qualification URL, which contains human readable description of the type of qualification earned.
- The qualification persistent ID. This should link to an online version of the qualification certificate. This could be an existing unique ID or simply a URI.