Today, ORCID celebrates the third anniversary of our launch event in Berlin, and I find myself once again in Germany, this time at our first outing to the Frankfurt Book Fair. A lot has changed, but not the sleep deprivation – and not our excellent Board, nor the very positive reception of ORCID by the research community. Thank you!
We now have close to 1.7 million registered researchers, and 400 members with over 150 integrations. We are up from a team of two at launch to 20 committed and passionate team members, who make ORCID what it is today. In the last year, between us, we’ve represented ORCID in every continent but Antarctica (I am working on it!) – and not just once but many times. I’ve had the personal pleasure of traveling to Australia and New Zealand four times!
Our balance sheet has a good mix of grant funding and growing revenue from memberships. I can see sustainability at the end of the tunnel – we’re reaching our financial goals, and planning new community initiatives.
We are starting to see more universities engaging. They now form 65% of our member base, including two new national consortia, in Italy and the UK, and are integrating ORCID iDs into a variety of systems, from HR to theses to federated login. The vendor community continues to build cool integrations, taking advantage of new ORCID features such as single sign on, contributorship, and our enhanced public and member APIs.
We are seeing sustained usage of the Registry around the world, and have added several new languages (Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Japanese) to our website and documentation. We’re now starting to think about how to add right-to-left languages.
What continues to be a pleasure, in addition to the ORCID team, is the enthusiasm with which we are welcomed in the scholarly community, and your willingness to enter into collaborations with us on projects and prototypes. We received a chocolate award at the Internet 2 Tech Exchange conference for our collaborative work with the federated identity management community. This week at the STM meeting in Frankfurt, I was part of a panel on collaborations in scholarly communications, and spoke about our work on peer review and auto-updates; I could have included a number of other collaborative projects, including THOR and contributor badges.
Building the research information “plumbing” could be a drudge job; it requires sustained activity and patience and is most definitely not sexy. With your support, however, it is fun. We are proud to be part of this community of organizations, across sectors and around the world, building a sustainable and interoperable infrastructure for digital scholarly communications.