Our brand new Affiliation Manager is finally here!
In case you haven’t heard about it, our Affiliation Manager, the first of our Member Portal tools, makes it easy for consortium members to add affiliation data to ORCID records by simply uploading a CSV file.
An assertion tool for ORCID consortium members
At the time of this writing, there are nearly 13 million total affiliations in ORCID records, yet members have only added a total of 1.2 million affiliations via their integrations. There are some valid reasons for this—for example, a lot of records were populated with affiliation data by early adopters of ORCID, before a lot of organizations had a chance to integrate with ORCID, so self-assertions are more common here. Regardless, we have some work to do to make it easier for institutions to integrate and/or to add affiliations to ORCID records, and this new Affiliation Manager is part of that.
Do you want to discover the ORCID iDs of the researchers at your institution?
“Who are my researchers?” is a very common question from members and prospective members. We’re delighted to say that this tool will help answer this question.
Do you want your institution to get the recognition it deserves?
At the same time as discovering the ORCID iDs of your researchers, the Affiliation Manager updates your researchers records with your affiliation data—making sure that your organization is marked as the source of that information. Doing so saves researchers time and helps other systems (such as grant management systems and submission systems) accurately track the affiliations of the researchers that interact with them. The tool even allows you to keep these affiliations up to date by adding new employees and marking the end date of departing employees affiliation information as needed.
How does it work?
An administrator at your organization creates and uploads a spreadsheet of email addresses and affiliation information (e.g., job title, start date, etc.) to the Affiliation Manager. They then download a set of clickable links from the Affiliation Manager and email them out using the mail merge tool of their own choosing. Then they sit back and watch as researchers engage with the emails, authenticate their ORCID iDs, and confirm their affiliations, all without writing a single line of code or purchasing another product.
The Affiliation Manager is available exclusively to Consortia Members at this time, however, the tool is part of a wider Member Portal project that aims to improve offerings for all ORCID members, regardless of if they are part of a consortia or not. We plan to roll out various other improvements to members throughout this year. In the meantime, if you are interested in becoming a Consortia Member to get this and other benefits, check out our list of Consortia here to see if there are any in your region you would like to join.
Onboarding is happening now!
If you are a Consortia Member and are interested in taking advantage of this new functionality, we are excited to begin onboarding you. Reach out to your consortia lead representative to get started. Rich affiliations metadata for your organization is just a few clicks away!