This post was co-authored by Josh Brown, ORCID’s Director of Partnerships, and Tom Demeranville, our Director of Product. Our thanks to Dr Carlin for his permission to share this use case.
At ORCID, our tagline is ‘connecting research and researchers’. Sometimes people ask us ‘what do you connect?’ and we usually refer them to our vision, which is 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”.
In this blog post, we will explore one case study of what that vision looks like in reality: one researcher, connected to an institution, to the funding that has enabled their research, and to all of those connected to the outputs that communicate their research findings to the wider world.
Dr Leo Carlin is a researcher. He is a leukocyte biologist, based at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow. Looking at his ORCID record, you can get a sense of his career, and how active he is – memberships, education, employment, publications and funding are all here. For the purposes of this blog post though, we will focus on the fact that he received funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), specifically for a project called “Regulation of Pulmonary Neutrophils In Vivo: Direct Interrogation by Intravital Microscopy,” supported by the Medical Research Council.
If you click the grant number shown in the ORCID record, it takes you to the project page in UKRI’s Gateway to Research, which provides much more information about the project:
If you click the people tab, it shows that both Leo and his ORCID iD are associated with the grant:
Looking at Leo’s ORCID record, there are a lot of works added from Europe PMC. A search in Europe PMC using either the grant number or the ORCID iD returns this paper (a collaborative project and led by Cristina Lo Celso of Imperial College and the Francis Crick Institute) that work funded by the grant contributed to:
The record for the paper shows ORCID iDs for several co-authors too, as well as three other funding sources for the work that lead to this paper being published:
The link to the article at the publisher’s site uses a Digital Object Identifier to direct potential readers to the published paper.
This case study shows identifiers and infrastructures working in harmony to connect and share research achievements.
