You can get a lot done in 365 days. Here is a quick run-through of 2019 at ORCID.
ORCID continues our work toward our vision of a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.
We organize our work around four core strategies:
RESEARCHERS: Position researchers at the center of everything we do
ORCID supports diverse communities. To ensure ORCID is inclusive, we have been working to redesign our website and just launched our new accessible home page (more to come in 2020). We established a product function at ORCID this year, led by Product Director Tom Demeranville, and we also created a Researcher Services team, led by Catalina Wilmers. We launched our Product Roadmap board, where anyone can check in on what we are working on and what is coming up next. We have developed tools and processes for engaging researchers in user interface co-design – with your ideas incorporated into a number of new features and bug fixes this year. And we have met with many of you in focus groups and in our Academia and Beyond working groups to better understand your needs and desires, including hosting a researcher to participate in our annual staff retreat.
TRUSTED ASSERTIONS: Enable a wide range of verified iD-ID connections
We released our latest and greatest API 3.0 this year, with support for more affiliations, research resources, more work types, normalized identifiers, and enhanced source transparency. We’ve worked more on supporting organization identifiers, both in the ORCID Registry and in our awareness work in research communities around the world.
INFRASTRUCTURE: Invest in developing a robust information infrastructure
We undergo annual external audits of our financials, led by Sarah Hershberger, Operations Director, and our Audit Committee. We have not yet closed out our books, but it looks like we may be able to declare 2019 our break-even year. Woot! We also undergo an annual external privacy and security audit, this year led by Will Simpson, who in addition to being our Technology Director has assumed the mantle of ORCID Privacy Officer. And if that is not enough in one year, Will and Sarah worked with the Audit Committee to create a risk register for the organization, which we are using to prioritize actions for the coming year. The Board completed a self-assessment this year, and a thorough review of ORCID governance policies has resulted in creation of a Board Charter and clarifying updates to our bylaws.
STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIPS: Develop sustainability through strategic relationships
ORCID awareness and adoption really took off among funders in 2019. The ORBIT project finalized its findings and recommendations for use of ORCID by funders, and a number of key funders announced policies or workflow integrations, including the US National Institutes of Health and the Australian Research Council. We’ve continued our work in other communities, including a number of presentations at events focused on research administration and evaluation, and direct engagement with publishers in our Peer Review and Publishing working groups.
‘Tis the season to not only reflect, but also to give thanks. I would like to use this opportunity to thank Josh Brown, Matt Buys, and Alice Meadows for their amazing dedication to ORCID and to wish them well in their new adventures. I welcome Ivo Wijnbergen as our new Director of Engagement and Julie Petro as our new Director of Communications. I thank the ORCID team for their ongoing engagement in our work to be a values-driven organization. And I thank the team for moving us all forward to an ever-better understanding of what it means to collaborate – in person, communing with persistence (this year, at the Grand Canyon – look at that blue blue sky!) and in virtual office-land, where we just hosted our first-ever end-of-year closer-to-carbon-neutral (and still fun!) virtual-office party.
Left to Right: Leo Mendoza, Tom Demeranville, Andrej Romanov, Ana Heredia, Brian Minihan, Laure Haak, Estelle Cheng, Ana Patricia Cardoso, Gabriela Mejias, Emilia Kutrovska, Nabil Ksibi, Padma Gopinath, Ivo Wijnbergen, Stephanie Harley, Sarah Hershberger, Bernette Sherman, George Nash, Eric Olson, Julie Petro, Rob Blackburn, Pedro Costa, Liz Krznarich, Julie Balter, Paula Demain, Mitra Najafi-Gheidari, Catalina Wilmers, Mallory Robertson, Shawna Sadler, Will Simpson, Angel Montenegro, and Camillia Lu (not pictured).
ORCID is all about people, and I thank each and every member of our team and our diverse communities for including ORCID in your lives. I look forward to continued global-scale collaboration to develop trust for open information sharing in the coming year.
