In this blog series we interview members of various ORCID consortia around the world to see how they are using and benefitting from the Affiliation Manager tool. This tool is available only to ORCID consortia members and has a number of different use cases that we will be highlighting in this series. If you have a case study that you would like us to feature in this series, please reach out to Paloma Marín-Arraiza, our Manager for Global Consortia at [email protected].
Sciences Po Paris, officially known as the Paris Institute of Political Studies, is a prestigious and internationally renowned university located in the heart of Paris, France. Founded in 1872, it is dedicated to the study of political science, international relations, law, economics, history, and related social sciences.
They are a member of the ORCID French consortium (ORCID France) and were one of the first consortium members in Europe to begin using the Affiliation Manager actively.
The French Consortium has also played a crucial role in the promotion and adoption of the tool in France. In 2022 the consortium created a working group with nine organizations to describe best practices and solve common problems about it. As a result, they published a guide in French with relevant FAQs for their members.
In this blog, we interviewed Delphine Lereculeur, project manager at Sciences Po Library, to document the use case of the Affiliation Manager at SciencePo Paris.
Can you describe the type of affiliations you’re adding to the ORCID Registry using the Affiliation Manager?
We only add institutional affiliations based on our signature charter for research publications. The affiliation includes two pieces of information: “Sciences Po” and the “Name of the research unit.”
Why did you decide to use the Affiliation Manager? What is your use case?
We decided to try this tool last year in order to complete the ORCID profiles of our permanent faculty members (around 300 researchers). If more than 80% of our researchers have an ORCID ID, only half have an updated profile, and one-third have not filled their affiliation.
What was the data collection process? How did you coordinate it internally? What is your data source?
Our main data source is a CSV file we update every year with key information about affiliations (organization, department, role, start date, end date) from our permanent faculty. First, the information is extracted from our research management tool, then we cross-check the data from ORCID API.
Did you face any challenges when using the tool? How did you overcome them?
Actually it is quite easy if you read the Affiliation Manager guide! What takes the most time is preparing the CSV file and sending an email to researchers.
What worked when communicating with researchers? What insights did you gain or lessons did you learn?
We manually sent an authorisation email to all researchers concerned (around one hundred) explaining why they should allow Sciences Po to update their record. We also need to reassure them that this tool is not for monitoring or evaluation and that they can withdraw their authorisation.
How do you plan to keep using the tool? Are you planning regular updates?
For the moment, we have only used it once, but we will use it for updating soon! If more institutions use it, it will improve the quality of the data.
Do you have any recommendations you would like to share with other members planning to use the tool?
If you want to plan to use this tool, you need a communications strategy too! At Sciences Po, only 30% of the researchers contacted have accepted to grant permission. So it means we still have to communicate about ORCID!
What is your one key takeaway that you want to share about your experience?
Be patient! Creating the CSV can take time and require a lot of collaboration with others.
Contributor
Delphine Lereculeur
Delphine Lereculeur is project manager at Sciences Po Library. She leads support activities and services for academic publishing and scholarly communication.
