The University of Liverpool, established in 1881, is a prestigious research-intensive institution located in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Renowned for its commitment to academic excellence, the university offers various undergraduate and postgraduate programs. With a rich history, vibrant campus life, and a global outlook, it fosters innovation and scholarly achievement. With a diverse global community of over 27,000 students, it employs over 4,000 staff, including academic and non-academic professionals dedicated to providing a supportive learning environment.
The University of Liverpool became an ORCID member in October 2015 as part of our UK Consortium led by Jisc. The University has added the Affiliation Manager to provide accurate affiliation data to their researchers’ ORCID records. As with any ORCID member organization, the University of Liverpool is in a unique position to add validated information about their researchers’ affiliation to their ORCID records. And by doing so, our members work together as a distributed global community of validated data contributors to improve the trustworthiness and integrity of the scholarly record as a whole.
We recently had a chance to interview Mareike Wehner, Research Publications Metrics Officer at the University of Liverpool, about how they leveraged existing ORCID adoption among its researchers and used the Affiliation Manager—an integration tool requiring no technical skills, available exclusively to consortium members—to ensure they are attributed correctly, and that their research is properly recognized and visible. Their integration is a good recent example of how organizations can use Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) in a complementary way, in their case, using ROR, the Research Organization Registry identifier, to help in disambiguating affiliation attribution.
Can you describe the type of affiliations you’re adding to the ORCID registry using the Affiliation Manager?
At the University of Liverpool, we are aware that many staff and Postgraduate Research (PGR) students involved in research are already signed up for an ORCID iD. We don’t really know at this stage what we don’t know. For example, there may be some researchers who might accidentally not be affiliated correctly with the University of Liverpool, and therefore not come up in certain reports.
The aim of introducing the Affiliation Manager was to make sure that staff/students who do have an ORCID iD are correctly affiliated with our institution—both for the ease and accuracy of running reports in the future, and also to encourage those who don’t yet have an ORCID iD to sign up. In the actual push, we included ROR information to help with the affiliation attribution.
In the future, we are hoping to make use of other integrations. ORCID hints at being able to include publications for researchers who have granted access, which would tie in nicely with our CRIS (Current Research Information System). This needs further exploration from our part; the claiming of profiles for our institution is the initial goal.
Why did you decide to use the Affiliation Manager? What is your use case?
ORCID being a free, non-profit organization, the sign-up for an iD being very straightforward, and the fact that funders and publishers alike not only recommend but sometimes require authenticated ORCID iDs in their systems made us want to engage with it as an institution more. One case sparked the debate specifically: a Liverpool researcher published a paper, but because of their honorary position at another institution (and said institution using the Affiliation Manager to claim their account) the specific publication was only listed under the other institution’s affiliation, and not Liverpool. To make it clear: we don’t intend a pushing of researchers back and forth, but rather for publications to be attributed correctly whilst leaving it up to the researcher whether they grant permission or not. If nothing else, it is a great prompt for everyone with an ORCID profile to check in with their current settings.
Inspired by this case, the possibility of being able to find and ingest data that is already out there but currently getting lost because of misattributions of affiliations was a great motivation. We decided to include not only research staff and teaching and research staff, but also PGR students, as they are just as involved in research. Getting into the habit of using profiles like ORCID from the get-go can also only help reduce the administrative burden. For future pushes, we aim to investigate other types of contracts, too.
Accurate data obviously plays a key role in strategic planning and ensures that the institution knows about the brilliant achievements of our staff and students engaged in research. The Affiliation Manager, and with it its notifications (or as we called them, “affiliation invitations”), seemed an easy enough tool to make big steps towards this recognition and awareness because of ORCID’s support and available resources, and also a straightforward process of sending the notifications themselves, which we did through the ORCID system rather than manually through a mail merge.
What was the data collection process? How did you coordinate it internally? What is your data source?
The project was led by a small team within the Open Research team of the library, reaching out to other stakeholders such as Marketing, Strategic Planning/Business Intelligence, HR and, of course, researchers as and when needed. A small core team made it easy to coordinate the different steps, from collecting the initial data, to communications strategy, to outreach and the final push.
With the help of Liverpool’s HR team, a list of all research staff, teaching and research staff and PGR students (just over 7,000 contacts) was collected. The spreadsheet also included the information listed in the Affiliation Manager Guide to have as complete a data set as possible from the start. This was something the HR team was able to provide.
We found it very useful that the email addresses for the notification did not have to be the same as the ones an ORCID profile might already be set up with. Obtaining that information would have been next to impossible, but creating a list of all relevant staff/students was straightforward.
Did you face any challenges when using the tool? How did you overcome them?
The Affiliation Manager itself has a very simple interface with only a few buttons, which means very little chance of getting something wrong. The only issue that came up was in a test and also in the initial full upload when the CSV was not accepted as it was and threw errors in the “disambiguated-organization-identifier” (e.g. ROR) field. The ORCID team was very helpful and fixed it promptly, since we could not identify the error on our end.
Somehow, a blank row or column was created when saving from Microsoft Excel to csv, so this is something that should be tested beforehand to avoid struggles on the scheduled day (see recommendations further below). We very much appreciated the ORCID team’s immediate help!
What worked when communicating with researchers? What insights did you gain or lessons did you learn?
For the communications strategy, we opted for a multi-pronged approach:
- All staff newsletter
- All staff intranet news story
- Faculty/department newsletters
- Library newsletter
- Library blog post
- Social media
- Digital screens on campus
- Webpages dedicated to researcher profiles
- Direct email to all affected staff/students to let them know about the notification
All communications except the digital screens on campus and the webpages on researcher profiles related directly and only to the affiliation project. Of course, brief remarks on the what and why were included for those not familiar with ORCID. The screens, however, showed a graphic encouraging anyone involved in research to sign up for an ORCID iD in the first place, whereas the web pages go into more detail on researcher profiles generally (not just ORCID iDs). The latter is a great resource to point both staff and students involved in research, as well as administration staff, in order to gain a greater understanding of the connections. This part of the communications strategy plays a role in a longer-term initiative making researchers aware of ORCID if they aren’t already, and have it come up not just in their induction, but throughout their time at Liverpool. The goal is to make sure researchers are familiar with ORCID and other researcher profiles and can use them to their full potential.
The main lesson learned was to talk with as many people from different departments as possible. Thanks to those colleagues, items were added to the communications strategy along the way, and new routes and possibilities (e.g. digital screens on campus) made accessible. The engagement and help offered were commendable.
How do you plan to keep using the tool? Are you planning regular updates?
Yes. Our plan is to receive updated HR lists every three months and upload a new CSV to the Affiliation Manager. The notifications will then be sent to pending contacts from previous pushes, as well as new staff and students provided in the lists.
Do you have any recommendations you would like to share with other members planning to use the tool?
Making sure you get everything in order before starting with the communications has proven successful. It meant once we knew we had everything ready to go, we could confidently set dates and communicate those, and move swiftly.
Uploading a test file was also useful. This way, we could play the exact process through with just one member of the team receiving the notifications to know exactly what the interface looked like and how it would change from a user perspective, but also within the Affiliation Manager, and what the reports would look like. The reports will be valuable for tracking how well ORCID is being adopted internally going forward.
Because we opted for the notifications to be sent by the tool rather than doing a mail merge, we decided it would be useful to send an email a day ahead of the push to “prewarn” staff and students. The domain was marked as local beforehand, but it gave us the opportunity to state that the link in the upcoming email was safe to click on, what to expect, and what benefits the granting of permission would have. Whilst it meant dealing with bounce-backs and out-of-office notifications, it actually helped update a number of email addresses where the out-of-office notifications advised that a different email would be more suitable. It is worth considering this as an extra step if the resources are available.
What is your one key takeaway that you want to share about your experience?
The key takeaway is that the Affiliation Manager project was not only useful for the direct results of connecting with more researchers that already have an ORCID iD, it also sparked many conversations and connections within existing teams and projects, therefore raising awareness on researcher profiles in general.
We are hoping that this spark can translate into more exposure, with researcher staff and students learning about the benefits and application of researcher profiles throughout their career, and in many cases, from the beginning. Providing the knowledge consistently and accessibly, as well as introducing the contacts that are there to assist, will hopefully take us closer to the goal of reducing the administrative burden for staff and students in the long run.
Contributor
Mareike Wehner
Mareike Wehner (she/her) is the Research Publications Metrics Officer within the Libraries, Museums and Galleries at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her role focuses on university-wide initiatives aimed at promoting awareness about the responsible use of metrics, and the ways researcher profiles can help staff and students involved in research keep their research activities organised. Previously, she worked in the academic publishing sector in digital products management.
