Understanding the impact of your funding programs is vital to your strategy, program design, and mission alignment. By embedding ORCID iDs in your funding workflows, you can reliably connect your awardee’s and funding programs—as well as saving everyone time and reducing 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.
A funding workflow will typically follow the workflow below:
- The applicant applies for a grant via the funders grant system
- The funder collects the authenticated author’s ORCID iD and requests permission to interact with the applicants record, and stores that permission.
- The funder collects data from the applicants record using the ORCID API and uses it to help populate the proposal/submission form. This helps to save the author time manually completing information that is already available within their ORCID record.
- If the funding is approved then the funder adds the funding to the awardee’s ORCID record
- The funder can then track and evaluate research results using the data from the awardee’s ORCID record over time
Example
Benefits
Not only can this reduce the drudgery of form-filling for researchers, it also ensures that funder names are used in a standard way, and makes it possible for publishers to streamline the capture of funding information. This information can then be used to automate reporting processes, saving time, shortening the reporting cycle, and increasing accuracy and completeness.
Our ORBIT project aimed to increase the efficiency of grant application workflows; improve the ease of program data collection; and promote research rigor and reproducibility. ORCID and the funder working group produced a report with their findings and recommendations
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
- Funding type:* The type of funding awarded, This field is selected from a list containing the following values: Award, Contract, Grant, Salary-award
- Funding title:* The title of the funding item
- Subtitle: A subtitle to the funding item
- Translated-title: The title the funding appears under in another language, the language of the translated title is recorded as an attribute
- Description: A description or short abstract of the funded project.
- Amount: The value of the award
- Unique funding identifier: * Add as many of these as your system is aware, as it aids in grouping on ORCID records.
- Funding identifier type: Use grant-number, DOI, URI or proposal-id
- Value of the identifier
- Identifier URL (optional)
- Relationship: self/part-of
This is to indicate the relationship of the funding item to the identifier. For example, if the funding item is for one phase of a multi-part grant, and the identifier is for the multi-part grant, then the relationship would be “part-of”; if the identifier is for the individual phase, then the relationship would be “self”.
- Funding agency (organization):* Information about the organization that awarded the funding
- Name of the agency
- Address (city and country)
- Organization identifier: Supported identifiers are ROR, Fundref and Ringgold** identifiers.
- Start date: The date the funding began
- End date: The date the funding ended
- Contributors information: Information about the individuals who received the funding
- ORCID iD: The ORCID iD of each collaborator to the funding project; this should only include authenticated ORCID iDs
- Role: The nature of the contribution by the researcher
* Indicates required field
**Although Ringgold identifiers still exist within the ORCID registry, as of 1 August 2023, ORCID no longer receives updates to the RINGGOLD organization identifier database used by our Registry, nor will we be able to process or use RINGGOLD IDs created after that date. See our FAQ for more info.
Technical documentation
A more detailed tutorial can be found here.