Member organizations can now acknowledge formal relationships — outside of employment — between an individual and your organization, and enable recognition for an award, honorary degree, or other distinction that you have conferred on someone.
This is great news for honorary fellows, guest researchers, visiting lecturers, and others, who would like to be able to more easily share information about their work and expertise — and to be more widely recognized for it. And it’s good for your organization, because it enables you to both give your researchers credit for their achievements and to ensure that information about their affiliation with you is correct and transparent.
There are two generalized workflows for adding affiliation assertions: by collecting ORCID iDs within your systems at registration or within the users profile pages; or by emailing existing users and asking them to connect their iD to your system.
Workflow 1: Collecting iDs within your systems
In this scenario, ORCID iDs are a requirement of the position/distinction, for example, when joining an organization or accepting an award.
- When registering their details via a web form, 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 appropriate section of the individual’s ORCID record with details of their position or distinction, connecting them with your organization.
- Display their authenticated ORCID iD alongside any publicly available information about them.
Workflow 2: Collecting iDs retrospectively
If your system already contains information about your researchers and their past activities, or if there is no registration component, you can instead:
- Email individuals a unique link they can use to connect themselves with your system.
- When clicked, this link directs the individual to ORCID to authenticate their iD and grant your organization permission to update their record.
- You then redirect them to a specially created web page you provide.
- Your system stores the link between the ORCID iD and email address/user account, and uses the permissions the individual has granted to update the appropriate section of their ORCID record, connecting them and their activity with your organization.
- Display their authenticated ORCID iD alongside any publicly available information about them.
Affiliation assertions contain start dates and end dates, and we strongly encourage you to populate these fields where possible, as this makes verification of the researcher’s affiliation with your organization easier. The workflows above enable long-term update permissions, which can be used to update the end date when an individual’s affiliation ends. Your system should use the ORCID API to add an end date (where applicable), in order to make the full term of the affiliation clear.
Benefits
You can help your researchers get credit 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 organization — connections that only your organization can make authoritatively — you ensure that your organization 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
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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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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/
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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.
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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
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All affiliation sections use the same set of metadata in the API:
- Organization name:* The name of the organization at the highest level (e.g. “Boston University”, rather than “Boston University School of Medicine”).
- Organization city:* City of where the organisation is based.
- Organization region: Region of where the organisation is based.
- Organization country* the country of the organisation. This should be populated with the two letter ISO 3166 Alpha-2 country code.
- Organization ID (ROR, GRID, RInggold** or LEI):* A unique identifier for the organization and its source. We recommend that the parent organization ID is used within the affiliation and not the division or department.
- Role/Title: The position held, or the degree awarded or to be awarded.
- Department: Any subdivision of the parent organization.
- URL: A URL to a resource about the affiliation
- Start date: The date the relationship between the researcher and organization began (can be specified down to year, month, and day).
- End date: The date the relationship between the researcher and organization ended (can be specified down to year, month, and day)
- An external persistent identifier describing the affiliation: A unique identifier for the actual affiliation assertion
*Indicates a 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.
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Technical documentation
A more detailed tutorial can be found here.