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
How do I collect an authenticated ID?
You collect authenticated IDs when you ask a researcher to sign in with their ORCID iD. This process uses a technology called “OAuth” or “SSO” and should be built into your workflow.
See the API Tutorial ‘Get an Authenticated ORCID iD‘ for more details.
How do I request permission to update an ORCID record?
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
How do I add items to an ORCID record?
Items (works, employment, funding, peer review etc) can be added to an ORCID record using the ORCID member API. You 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
What should I communicate to my users?
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.
Why should I collect authenticated ORCID iDs?
Collecting validated ORCID iDs for individuals through the OAUTH process is important. Individuals sign into their ORCID accounts using their registered email address and password or they can create a new account and then authorize your system to obtain their ORCID iD. This ensures you get the correct ORCID iD for the researcher and that the information on that record reflects their research activities (see What’s So Special About Signing In).
Why should I update ORCID records?
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.
What information does a peer review item contain?
- 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
Technical documentation
A more detailed tutorial can be found here.