In addition to employment and education affiliations, ORCID users and members can also add membership and service activities, including editorial service. Publishers, including journals and other research publication organizations can recognize your editorial activities.
This is great news for editorial teams, advisory boards, and others who would like to be able to share information about their work and expertise with others, and to be publicly recognized for their contributions to the scholarly record.
Typically, editorial service may follow the steps below, although we are aware that this can vary between integrators depending on specific use cases.
- Before or after joining an editorial board or team and registering their details via a manuscript submission system, registrants are asked to authenticate their ORCID iD and grant your organization permission to interact with their record.
- Once their registration is approved, your system updates the Professional activities section of the individual’s ORCID record with details of their editorial service activities, connecting them with your journal.
- Their ORCID iD and logo should be displayed alongside any publicly available information about the editor, such as an individual profile page or a listing on an “about this journal” page.
Professional activities assertions like editorial service contain start dates and end dates. The workflows above provide long-term update permissions, which can be used to update the end date when an individual’s period of service finishes. As well as providing a start date when you first update their record, your system should also use the ORCID API to add an end date to your editors’ records, to make their full term of service for your publication clear.
Benefits
You can help your editors get credit for their editorial service by connecting validated information about their affiliation with you to their ORCID records. At the same time, you will be helping to build trust in scholarly communications. By asserting the connection between individuals and your publication — connections that only your publisher can make authoritatively — you ensure that your publication is appropriately acknowledged when your employees and affiliates make professional contributions. That information can then be shared, with the researcher’s permission, with the other systems they interact with, helping to create a trustworthy research information infrastructure.
More information
The basics
Items (works, employment, funding, peer review etc) can be added to an ORCID record either manually or using the ORCID member API. If you are an individual looking to update your record check out our help section on this here. If you are a member looking to add items to an ORCID record, you will need the following:
- The researchers permission
- Member API credentials
- And either:
- A vendor system that integrates with the ORCID Member API
- Your own system that integrates with the ORCID Member API
For a complete guide for members using the API to items to a record check out our API tutorial link below:
To support the social component we offer a toolkit of Outreach Resources to help you develop a campaign to support your integration, and communicate to your researchers:
- What ORCID is.
- Why your system collects iDs and how your system will perform tasks, such as updating their records.
- Why your researchers will benefit by creating an ORCID iD and connecting their iDs to your system.
- How ORCID benefits the wider, global research community.
We will be continually building out this “library” of resources based on feedback from the community. If you have an idea for something you might like to see, please feel free to contact us.
Integrating ORCID into your system allows your organization to collect authenticated ORCID iDs and add them to your own data. At the same time, the researcher provides the organization permission to read and write to and from their ORCID record.
To make this work, organizations MUST obtain authenticated ORCID iDs using the ORCID OAuth API. This means they include an ORCID branded button or link within their system, that when clicked, asks the user to sign in to their ORCID record.
Once signed in, the user will be asked to authorize access to the system asking for their ORCID iD
The user’s ORCID iD and name on the ORCID record (depending on visibility settings) is returned to the organization as part of this process. The system can then request additional data from the ORCID API.
The above described workflow for collecting authenticated APIs is available in both ORCID’s public and member APIs. The former is available for use free of charge by non-commercial services.
The process to get permission to add or update data on a user‚s ORCID record uses OAuth, as described in our 3 Legged OAuth FAQ. Only ORCID members can use the Member API to ask for update permissions. In simple terms it works like this:
- Your local system creates a special link
- When clicked, the user is sent to ORCID, signs in and grants permission
- ORCID sends the user back to your system with an ‘authorization code’
- Your system exchanges that code for an ‘access token’
- The access token lets you update the user’s record
ORCID strives to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. Ensuring that the correct ORCID iD is associated with the right researcher is a critical step in building the trustworthiness of the ORCID dataset and the broader scholarly communications ecosystem. For this reason, ORCID does not permit the manual collection or entry of ORCID IDs in any workflow where it is possible to collect ORCID IDs directly from record holders themselves.
Researchers can easily and securely share their ORCID iDs with the systems they interact with, which proves they own their ORCID iD. Those systems can then share information about researcher activities with other systems, which creates a chain of validated and trusted assertions about researcher activity. The end result is that the correct person is associated with the correct activities across a broad range of scholarly information workflows.
For more information see: https://info.orcid.org/collecting-and-sharing-orcid-ids/
You can help make life easier for your users by connecting validated information to their ORCID records. You will also be helping to build trust in scholarly communications and, by keeping that data up to date, you can reduce the reporting burden for your users and improve data quality.
ORCID for Research Organisations
In addition to its use as a persistent identifier for your researchers, ORCID can help you take control of how your institution‚s name is used across research systems. In combination with other persistent identifiers ORCID enables you to authoritatively assert your staff, faculty, and student affiliations with your institution. You can also use ORCID APIs to receive real-time notifications about research activities, to auto-update forms, and to follow your alumni’s careers.
ORCID for Funding Organisations
By embedding ORCID iDs in your funding workflows, you can reliably connect your grantees and funding programs — and save everyone time and reduce errors caused by manual keying of information. Using ORCID in your system(s), you can play your part in building a trusted research information infrastructure by asserting connections between individuals and the grants you award them.
ORCID for Publishers
Researchers are at the heart of everything that scholarly and research publishers do. Accurate author and reviewer information is vital to indexing, search and discovery, publication tracking, funding and resource use attribution, and supporting peer review.
ORCID serves as an information hub, enabling your authors and reviewers to reliably connect to their contributions, and to share information from their ORCID record as they interact with your publishing systems. Collecting iDs for all your authors and reviewers during the publication process — whether for books, journals, datasets, compositions, presentations, code, or a variety of other works — allows for information to be easily shared, ensures researchers can provide consent to share, saves researchers time and hassle, reduces the risk of errors and, critically, enables researchers to get the credit they deserve for the important work they’re doing.
I have developed my integration using the Sandbox, how do I get Production Member API credentials?
Member organizations request ORCID Member API credentials on the production (live) server by completing the Production Member API client application form. Before issuing production Member API credentials, the ORCID Engagement team/Consortia Lead will review a demo of your integration in the ORCID sandbox. This gives us a chance to see the great integrations you have built and offer workflow improvements, as well as check that all integrations meet our best practices and minimal requirements for launch.
To provide a demo of your system you’ll need to set up a working integration with the ORCID sandbox that the ORCID team can preview. There are a few ways to share your working sandbox integration:
- Recommended: Live demo: Contact us to schedule a live demonstration. We’ll provide meeting software that allows you to share your screen for you to demo your integration.
- Test site: If your development site is public, send us the URL along with test credentials (if needed) to access your system and instructions describing how to use your system’s ORCID features. Provide additional documentation to verify what we would not be able to see from the user end, e.g. API version used, what data is stored by your system, etc.
- Screencast or screenshots :Send a recording or a set of screenshots with descriptions clearly explaining and demonstrating how your integration works at each step, including what happens if a user denies access or disconnects their iD. Be sure to provide additional documentation to verify anything we would not be able to see from the user end, such as API version used and how data is stored
All affiliation sections use the same set of metadata in the API:
- Organization name*: The name of the journal
- External identifier*: The registered ISSN of the journal
- URL: A website URL related to the homepage of the journal
- Role/title: The title of the role or description of the editorial service
- Start date: The date the relationship between the researcher and the journal began (can be specified down to year, month, and day)
- End date: The date the relationship between the researcher and the journal ended (can be specified down to year, month, and day)
Note that Editorial Service activities with a valid ISSN will display as Editorial Service within the UI. Like other Service activities, Editorial Service is added via the Service API endpoint and is read as Service in the API. These activities do not require an Organization ID.
*Indicates a required field.
Technical documentation
A more detailed tutorial can be found here.