In this special guest blog post, Director of Libraries and Support Resources Fernando Garzón Vásquez and Academic Journals Professional Oscar Manuel Ariza Romero, both from UNIMINUTO (Colombia), discuss how UNIMINUTO used the Affiliation Manager to engage their lecturers, researchers, and students with ORCID.
The Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios, or UNIMINUTO, is a private higher education institution with Catholic roots and campuses across Colombia. It hosts 3,666 lecturers and researchers among over 89,000 students and promotes an academic community that works at the service of an integral education. It works to incorporate cognitive, professional, social, and human processes, fully developed through teaching, research, and social projection. The institution is open to all creeds, races, sexes, and socio-economic conditions and guarantees freedom of teaching and research and views open science as integral to the good of the public. This year, UNIMINUTO created an institutional affiliation project with the help of ORCID’s Affiliation Manager tool. The objective was to have the information of active lecturers and researchers in the institution updated by the end of 2022.
Open science as a public good
UNIMINUTO supports open and citizen science, which it sees in part as the democratization and humanization of knowledge based on the scientific integrity of the educational community. It values the true inclusion and openness of knowledge from institutions to the territories, communities, and the people.
Currently UNIMINUTO is advancing the guidelines for members of the educational community to implement the “digital footprint” process that will allow them to access the institutional program that contributes to the generation of a 2.0 culture within a digital society that promotes the democratization of knowledge and its openness, based on the principles of open science.
Based on the understanding that there are various possibilities to establish, create, and be part of the digital society, UNIMINUTO encourages the adoption of:
- Profiles: CvLac (CV platform in Colombia) and Google Scholar
- Identifiers: ORCID, Scopus, ResearcherID
- Reference managers: Mendeley
- Academic social networks: Research Gate
Coordinated communications yield results
To make this project work, highly granular data on the lecturers and researchers, such as department, role, and dates, was standardized in order to adapt the information to the format accepted by the Affiliation Manager tool. After a training session from ORCID, UNIMINUTO conducted a coordinated communication effort with the Directorate of Libraries and Support Resources. One of the communications strategies it used included the production of an infographic to help easily and effectively convey the requested action steps.
Finally, a personalized e-mail was sent to each of the users registered in the Affiliation Manager with the authorization link for each user. The library intends to keep following up by email until they achieve their goal result. Meanwhile, the ability to receive notifications from ORCID can be of help in creating a communications workflow.
On a pathway to growth
The findings show that after two weeks, five percent of the researchers and lecturers implemented their institutional affiliation in their ORCID profile. The administrators continue to work with the feedback received from the academic community to correct some of the challenges that have surfaced to create a more efficient and user-friendly process..
UNIMINUTO has ambitious goals to end 2022 with 40 percent of the lecturers and researchers with their institutional affiliation linked in ORCID and will work to strengthen the communications strategies for reaching the institution’s academics. It is UNIMINUTO’s goal to improve the value of our researchers’ ORCID records and, in turn, save them time and effort and improve workflows so they can spend more time focused on scientific research and related activities.
Some ORCID-enabled systems write affiliation data too!
If you are an ORCID member organization of any kind, either consortium or direct, and are not currently writing affiliation data to your researchers’ records, check and see if your organization is using one of the vendors that offer ORCID-enabled functionality in their current research information/research information management system (CRIS/RIM), funding, repository, and publishing platforms or services.
Some of these systems are widely used (such as DSpace CRIS or Pure) and include the ability to write affiliation data to researcher records. Supported ORCID functionality and configuration steps vary by system, but if your organization is using one of them, getting your connection to the ORCID registry is a lot simpler than you think!
