It has been a year since we launched our Collect & Connect program – a good time to take stock of our progress and look forward to the next year. Have we been effective at communicating the goals of the program? How many of our member integrations have we reviewed? What are the main challenges for our members in launching effective ORCID integrations? How can we better support our members as you build and update your integrations?
First, though, a quick reminder about the program, which sets out the requirements for each sector – funders, publishers, and research institutions – to help achieve our mantra of “enter once, reuse often” by:
Collecting validated ORCID iDs for individuals to ensure they’re correctly associated with their affiliations and contributions
Displaying iDs to signal to researchers that the information system is plumbed to support their use of ORCID
Connecting information about affiliations and contributions to ORCID records, creating trusted assertions and enabling researchers to easily provide validated information to other systems and profiles they use
Synchronizing between research information systems to improve reporting speed and accuracy, and reduce data entry burden for researchers and administrators alike
Underpinning everything is authentication – requiring users to log into their ORCID record to share their iD, rather than keying in or pasting their ORCID iD into a data field. Our hope and expectation is that all organizations using ORCID – members and non-members – will meet the Authentication, Collect, and Display elements, which can be achieved using the public or member APIs. Connect and Synchronize must be implemented with the member API, and are available to our member organizations.
So, how have we done and what have we learned?
Our original goal was to map all our member integrations in the first year, but this has turned out to be a much bigger task than we anticipated. To date, with help from some of our consortia leads, we have reviewed 155 live ORCID member integrations – just under half the total. That’s the good news. The not so good news is that, of those 155, only eight have fully met the requirements of Authenticate and one or more other elements – and, therefore, been awarded the relevant badge(s). We’d like to recognize those organizations here, and thank them for their leadership:
- Editorial Manager (Aries Systems)
- Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
- Cape Peninsula University of Technology
- eLife
- IRMA (University Office)
- Overleaf (Digital Science)
- ProQuest Pivot
- ScienceOpen
What is missing in many otherwise excellent integrations is researcher communications. The main lesson we have learned is that, for most of our members, getting the technology right is relatively straightforward, but getting the messaging right is much harder – whether that’s explaining the benefits of ORCID to users or how and why you’re using ORCID in your systems. Good communication about the why, what, and how of ORCID is critical to researcher adoption and use, so later this week we will be launching phase two of this program – Collect, Connect, and Communicate.
In the meantime, please check out our Collect & Connect information for funders, research organizations, and publishers. And look out for regular updates on members gaining Collect & Connect badges in the coming months, as well as a new improved version of our member and integration chart, which will incorporate Collect & Connect status for all integrations we have reviewed – more on that in August!