ORCID’s Affiliation Manager benefits different organizations and their researchers in unique ways. The Affiliation Manager allows our consortium member organizations to manage data for:
- Employment,
- Education and qualifications,
- Invited positions and distinctions, and
- Membership and Services
in their researchers’ records. We invited Deborah Buehler of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) to share their experience as the first institution to use the Affiliation Manager for Invited positions and distinctions.
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization. We convene extraordinary minds—across disciplines and across borders—to address the most important questions facing science and humanity. Our challenge (and opportunity) with ORCID is that we are an additional affiliation for researchers and often they do not know where to put us on their ORCID records. We’d been wrestling with our integration because our researchers are not part of our database’s single-sign-on system since they are not our employees. Instead, they are invited to be part of our global community and they become fellows, advisors, global scholars, and chairs as part of our different programs. CIFAR does not have academic ‘employees’ or ‘faculty’ in the traditional sense, and our researchers all have a primary affiliation to another research institute or university—not to CIFAR.
A Unique Challenge
How do we capture information about our global research community in a way that honors the researcher’s unique and invited position at CIFAR and also lets others know that these scholars are associated with our organization? Given our relationship with our researchers, the field “Invited positions and distinctions” on the ORCID record made the most sense, but how then to help our researchers add us to their records? For that we needed an ORCID integration. This is where ORCID’s recently released integration tool —the Affiliation Manager—comes in. Affiliation Manager allows us to integrate with ORCID through CSV files rather than requiring a full integration with our organizational database.
And a Simple Solution
By using Affiliation Manager, we can collect authenticated ORCID iDs from our scholars and—with their permission—add their CIFAR data to their record, all using simple CSV files. We save our researchers time and keep references to our organization standardized by adding their relationship to CIFAR directly to their ORCID record under “Invited positions and distinctions” section.
ORCID’s Affiliation Manager was a game changer for us, and we share our experience with the hope that it might help other organizations with similar relationships to their researchers.
If you are a consortia member who is interested in learning more about adding affiliation data to your researchers’ ORCID records quickly, read our introduction to the ORCID Affiliation Manager.
