Advancing Trust and Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: ORCID’s New Editorial Service

ORCID and scholarly publishers have a long history.

Publishers were among ORCID’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters, offering critical startup loans and other valuable and foundational resources. As adoption for ORCID began to grow, the support from publishers was fundamental to improving ORCID adoption rates globally. Today, they remain the top contributors of validated data to the ORCID Registry, largely in the form of works attributed to authors, which strengthens the scholarly record when that data gets shared by record holders and propagated throughout the multiple institutional systems they interact with.

Editors and their editorial contributions are no less critical to the integrity of the scholarly landscape. Publications represent the culmination of work not only by researchers, but also by the editorial teams whose dedication and curation are hallmarks of their experience in their fields of research. Journal editors are responsible for managing review processes, publication standards, and communication, and editorial board members advise publishers on research integrity and publication standards. Which is why we are excited to offer a new way to support publishers’ ability to recognize editorial responsibilities within the ORCID record.

You’re likely familiar with the Professional activities section of the ORCID record that categorizes researcher activities and special affiliations such as Distinctions, Memberships, or Services. As you can see in the screenshot above, we recently included “Add Editorial Service” to provide a standardized means of crediting editorial works and processes so that publishers can formally acknowledge and credit their editors’ service in the growth, development, and management of research publications.

Adding Editorial Service activities

Editorial Service activities can be added to ORCID records in three ways:

• Publishers can collect and display editor information in their publications as well as on ORCID, enhancing transparency and trustworthiness of publications.
• Manuscript Submission systems can now improve upon existing integrations, providing streamlined ways to synchronize editorial activities, enriching their data, and offering a more comprehensive view of scholarly contributions.
• Record holders that are editors can manually add their Editorial Service activities to their own records, sharing information about their work and expertise with others, and be publicly recognized for their contributions to the scholarly record.

As ORCID members have access to the Member API they can both read and write Editorial Service activities the same way as other affiliations, using an ISSN in place of an organization ID. Members can read more about how to incorporate Editorial Service activities into integration workflows here.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Professional activities section can be found under the Activities part of the ORCID record. The Editorial Service activity can also be added manually by record holders by clicking +Add within the Professional activities header.

Strengthening trust and reputation with Editorial Service

We are excited to offer journals or other research publication organizations the opportunity to add validated data—and therefore Trust Markers—about Editorial Services from their institutional systems to ORCID records. In addition to recognizing the contributions of editorial teams, Trust Markers strengthen trustworthiness of editors’ ORCID records.

Publishers can help preserve their journals’ reputations, distinguishing them from predatory ones, by adding data to ORCID records about editorships via authoritative links. Further, providing editors with credit for their service helps the scholarly publishing industry improve journal integrity by providing a verified history of an editor’s valuable contributions.

Learn more about ORCID for Journal Editors to understand how ORCID Trust Markers streamline research integrity workflows. If you are an ORCID member organization, get started adding Editorial Service activities here. By adding Editorial Service to ORCID records, editors and publishers can advance trust in research while crediting journal editors for their valuable time and service contributions.