Peer review is central to the evaluation of research – not just for journal article publication, but also for conference programming, for awarding grants, and for making hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Embedding ORCID iDs into your review workflows can help streamline your processes, improve the management of people databases, and provide recognition for your reviewers.
Typically, a peer review workflow will follow the pattern described below, although this can vary depending on the specific use case.
- During the review process, the reviewer is asked to provide their ORCID iD by signing in to their ORCID record or registering a new iD if they don’t already have one. This may be done within the review system (eg a manuscript submission system) or via an email or other message sent directly to the reviewer
- The reviewer is asked to authorize (or deny) access for the convening organization to read and update their record
- Once the review has been completed, the convening organization (or their service provider, where appropriate) emails the reviewer to thank them for their contribution and may choose to request permission to upload information about this specific review to their ORCID record
- Once approval is given, the convening organization/service provider adds information about the review to the Peer Review section of the ORCID record. Note, the Peer Review section can only be populated by an ORCID member organization, not by users.
Example
Benefits
Embedding ORCID iDs in your workflows can help publishers and associations streamline your processes, improve the management of CRM and other people databases, and improve discoverability.
Importantly, you can play your part in building a trusted research information infrastructure by asserting the connection between your reviewers and their review activity and other contributions.
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:
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
- Role:* The individual’s role in the review process, which can be selected from: chair, editor, member, organizer, reviewer
- Group identifier:* The group ID that is used for aggregation purposes — for journal articles, the default identifier is the eISSN, which is automatically populated via an integration with the ISSN database. Please note, if you need to assign an identifier other than an ISSN you will need to create it before.
- Convening organization*: The organization which organized the review – a journal publisher, conference organizer, funding agency, faculty, etc
- Organization identifier: The persistent identifier for the convening organization. We currently support ROR, Ringgold**, GRID, LEI or Crossref Funder Registry identifier. Please note: this is not a mandatory field but we would recommend you post this data if you have it available.
- Review data:* This data refers to the review activity and not what was reviewed
- Type: The type of review activity: review or evaluation
- Date: The date the review was completed. This can be broad (2008) or specific (2010-12-10)
- Review identifier: A unique, preferably resolvable identifier provided by the source of the review itself. Unless the review is openly available, we recommend that this does not contain identifiable data that can be traced back to the subject of the review
- Review URL: A link to a representation of the review or review record online
- Information about the review subject: Whatever the reviewer reviewed
- Subject type: The type of item that was reviewed, e.g. journal article, conference paper
- This includes the list of work types AND the list of grant types (“grant”, “contract”,”award”,”salary-award”) AND research-“resource-proposal” AND “undefined”
- Subject name: The name of the reviewed item
- Subject external identifier: The unique identifier of the subject of the review, e.g. an article DOI
- Subject container name: The name of the object of which the review subject is part, e.g. the conference for which the paper was reviewed
- Subject URL: The URL of the subject that was reviewed
- Subject type: The type of item that was reviewed, e.g. journal article, conference paper
* 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.