It is always wonderful to end the year with a bang. Just in time for the New Year fireworks, we reached a major milestone: 1,000 members! In addition, about 5,000 researchers create an iD every day, and our API is now used about 100m times a month!
Researchers are central to everything we do at ORCID and, over the past few years, we’ve spent time working with key communities — publishers, research institutions, and funders — to support them as they implement ORCID in their researcher workflows. In 2019, we’re turning our attention to researchers themselves!
2019 – The Year of the Researcher
In 2019 roadmap, we are focusing the four core strategies from our strategic plan on researchers. You can follow our progress on our 2019 Roadmap webpage.
Strategy 1: Researcher. Establish compelling reasons and methods for researchers to use ORCID to share verified information about themselves. Our Academia & Beyond project will expand our understanding of the needs of researchers in the Arts & Humanities and Life Science/Clinical Medicine communities. In Improving the User Experience, we are going in deep to ensure the ORCID Registry is broadly accessible and that researchers have a positive and consistent experience when using their iD. Look for us at workshops and other events, where we’ll be carrying out focus groups!
Strategy 2: Infrastructure. Establish ORCID’s role as a trusted and neutral actor in sharing information. We want researchers to have confidence that ORCID services will be there when they are submitting a paper or applying for funding! So, we are starting a multi-year scalability and resiliency project — Data Infrastructure — including work to enhance API service levels and ensure continuity of service for the increasing number of systems using ORCID as a login. In parallel, in our Operations project, we are working to improve our back-office services in areas that have a direct impact on the research community, such as member self-service and badging.
Strategy 3: Trusted assertions. Establish ORCID as a credible hub for asserting and re- using researcher information. Three of our 2019 projects are focused on helping researchers make the most out of iD-ID connections. PID Power will extend our assertion assurance work – our goal is to finally explain this in a way that everyone understands (look for our multi-modal presentation at PIDapalooza!) including by demonstrating practicality and utility in the ORCID Registry. Alongside this work, our Person Citations thought leadership project will explore the notion of “contribution” to include a corpus of a person’s activities. And we will be extending our 2018 project on collecting evidence of impact, to document and Share our Successes and outcomes and identify gaps, starting with this new infographic!
Srategy 4: Strategic relationships. Increase engagement with our global community. This year we will continue our work on the ORBIT project, with funder demonstration projects and a new working group focused on harmonizing the researcher experience for data exchange in funding application and reporting workflows. We are also launching RIPEN (Research Information Platform ENgagement), a community pilot, to make ORCID easier to use in a variety of research workflows.
Calling all researchers!
Interested in helping ORCID meet your needs? We are looking for working group participants, people to help us set up focus groups, and your feedback! If you are an arts and humanities researcher or a life sciences/clinical sciences researcher, we invite you to consider participating in our Academia and Beyond project. If you are interested in brainstorming what it means to cite a person (and how to do it), we invite you to consider participating in our Person Citations project. And if you are interested in helping to improve our user interface and user experience, please consider participating in our focus groups – and in suggesting venues to engage with your colleagues. More information on working groups is available on our Community webpage. To volunteer, please contact [email protected]. To provide feedback, please use our iDeas Forum.
Sustainability
Our plan from the beginning has been persistence through adherence to openness, researcher-centric principles, and fiscal responsibility. We have been making steady progress toward financial sustainability, with help from grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust as we built our services and membership base. We thank our funders, our members, and everyone who has supported us financially since our launch. 2019 will be our first year without grant support, and we are also projecting it will be our first year of positive cash flow. You’ll hear more when we reach this important milestone.
We thank everyone in our community for your continued support and look forward to working with you this year and into the future!
