Convey Connects Relationship and Financial Interest Disclosures to ORCID Records

The ORCID and Convey teams have co-authored this post to provide clarity on how the two services provide different and complementary support for increasing transparency in the research process.

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Disclosure of financial and non-financial relationships is critical to preserving and increasing trust in science and research. However, researchers and organizations have long struggled with the administrative burdens associated with both submitting and collecting disclosures. With no single system integrated within the broad span of research activities, the challenge of collecting complete and consistent disclosures has undermined efforts to increase transparency and trust in science.

The Convey system allows both organizations and individuals to leave behind outdated paper-based workflows as well as the awkward repurposing of existing systems, e.g. peer review, for disclosure collections. Built specifically for disclosure collections, Convey optimizes the experience for organizations through flexible disclosure policy management and for individuals by enabling reuse of some or all of their disclosure information for distribution to other organizations or groups.

The Convey disclosure collection system was developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) to meet the need of its member institutions to make the process of submitting and collecting disclosures more efficient, more consistent, and meaningfully less burdensome. From its launch in 2018, Convey has supported both individuals who are submitting disclosures as well as the organizations and groups that are collecting the disclosures. However, Convey’s users now extend beyond AAMC member institutions to span the broader scientific community including societies and associations, publishers, and academic medical centers.

Supporting organizations

Convey’s core subscriber base is made up of societies, associations, academic medical centers, and publishers. The system creates a fully electronic, consistent, and scalable disclosure process supporting subscribers that have less than 500 disclosures annually to those that have more than 50,000 disclosures collected annually. Convey has many integrations established with third-party systems introducing and optimizing automation into our subscribers’ disclosure workflows.

As a centralized repository for disclosures, the Convey system allows organizations to input their specific disclosure policies and rules for their communities and hand over the management of the disclosure collections process to the system. On the flip side, Convey also benefits individuals submitting disclosures, especially repeat users of the system, by providing them with an online interface that is secure and intuitive. Individuals can use Convey to disclose to requesting organizations OR they can use the system as a personal repository for disclosure information which can be distributed as needed in the default International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) format. The Convey team is committed to meeting disclosers wherever they are in their scholarly life, strengthening standards in disclosure collections, and providing reasonable flexibility to optimize the disclosure collection workflow.

Although the Convey system can support both organizations as well as individuals across market segments, the core of its users come from the scientific community. It is this core group of Convey users that motivated the development of an integration with ORCID. Through this integration, the Convey system strengthens the ability of its subscribing organizations to more quickly and confidently assess whether bias(es) and/or potential conflicts of interest exist by enabling a continuous thread connecting individuals with a persistent ORCID ID and all of their associated scholarly records and outputs.

A lightweight integration

From a user perspective, connecting Convey and ORCID accounts is a simple process. When a researcher creates or updates their account on Convey.org, they are prompted to “Manage ORCID ID.” They can do this by clicking on a link to “Connect Your ORCID ID,” which leads to the ORCID login page. A successful login will result in the researcher’s ORCID ID auto-populating in their Convey account record.

For those researchers that initiate the disclosure process as part of a publishing workflow, Convey can also capture ORCID IDs via integrations with the ORCID-certified Editorial Manager system, as well as the eJournalPress peer review system. Publishers and societies licensing eJournalPress and Editorial Manager can enable the automated transmission of ORCID IDs to Convey. The Convey system will add the ORCID IDs to the account records of the discloser.

Disambiguation and context building

ORCID solves the same problem in the disclosure process as it does in other research processes, specifically disambiguation of the researcher in a pool of other researchers, even from those with the same or similar name. Additionally, the link between ORCID and Convey allows evaluators of researchers’ disclosure information to quickly get a more complete understanding of their interests and research outputs in support of identifying—or ruling out—the existence of potential conflicts of interest.

Supporting researchers

Each year, researchers can spend up to 20 hours on disclosure submissions with one report showing that most of this time is spent entering basic information that is duplicated across disclosures. As a centralized disclosure collection platform, Convey greatly decreases the time that researchers spend by allowing them to reuse disclosure information across multiple organizations and disclosure events. This was particularly noticeable for one Convey user who had 210 financial interests to disclose.

The average initial disclosure in Convey takes 20 minutes, and this drops to 12 minutes for the second disclosure and continues to decrease as more financial interests are stored in the system, saving researchers many hours of work each year. Today, 25 percent of Convey’s users have used the system more than once.

Jonathan Schultz, the Director of Journal Operations for the American Heart Association (AHA) shares that “Authors who repeatedly use the system experience meaningful benefits when they come back to use it for additional manuscripts.”

Increasing trust and transparency in research

Convey has integrated with ORCID to support the research community by enabling access to a more complete view of researchers and their research process. Convey is committed to embedding in the research ecosystem while also increasing transparency in the process.

Email DK Sujlana, Director of Convey, at [email protected] to learn more about the strategic and practical impact of the system via the ORCID integration and beyond.