Alison McGonagle-O’Connell is the Marketing Manager at Aries Systems Corporation, creator of cloud-based workflow solutions for scholarly publishers. Within the scholarly publishing community, Alison is a member of SSP, the CSE Program Committee, and the ISMTE Sponsorship Committee. Be on the lookout for a poster by Alison and Aries colleagues Michael Di Natale and Kathleen Horgan at the ORCID-CASRAI Outreach Meeting in Barcelona.
The best part of being in the business of scholarly publishing is contributing to the fabric of research that will endure far beyond any of us, or our solutions, will. Contributor identity is vital to making sure that record is accurate and properly constructed so that it will endure. This is what makes ORCID so crucial. Works must be discoverable, and searches must yield accurate results. This requires precision in how works are attributed to authors. As a publication submission system vendor, our role is to provide effective tools to enable accurate attribution. Submission systems need to collect authenticated ORCID iDs from each author, and publishers need to integrate identifiers into their submission and production workflows.
Attribution at the Source
ORCID provides publishers a toolkit to collect valid ORCID iDs for all authors on newly submitted manuscripts. There are several points in the submission and publication process where ORCID iDs can be leveraged to improve attribution.
- At the time of submission, publishers can request authors to connect their ORCID iD with their manuscript, using an authenticated sign-in/registration process that ensures data accuracy and appropriate attribution.
- Publishers can send co-authors a confirmation email to connect their ORCID iD to the submission, also using their ORCID credentials.
- Concurrently, the publisher can allow researchers to pull data from their ORCID record to complete fields in the submission form and request permissions to update the author’s ORCID record should the paper be accepted.
- Publishers can streamline the submission process by enabling single-sign-on with ORCID credentials. We see single-sign-on as a key component in encouraging researcher adoption: a journal can collect and authenticate an author’s ORCID and the author doesn’t need to remember different logins across configured sites – just their ORCID credentials. Currently, Editorial Manager journals support Single Sign On with ORCID, as do Publons and a growing number of other publishing and review systems. ORCID is working with the university community on federated log-in processes, and later this year it will be possible to pair ORCID credentials with university single-sign-on processes.
- Publishers can request reviewers also provide ORCID credentials. Several review platforms support ORCID, including Academic Karma, F1000, and ScienceOpen, and ORCID will be supporting attribution of peer review later this year, using new community standards for citation of peer review.
Downstream benefits
Like all other pieces of metadata captured upstream in editorial workflows, the benefits of ORCID iDs are relevant downstream, too.
- Publishers can include ORCIDs in their JATS XML output, so that ORCID iDs can enhance discoverability in PubMed databases.
- Publishers can pass ORCIDs ORCID iD to CrossRef to enable ORCID record update processes
- Publishers can embed ORCIDs in data exports to services like PRE, to further enable publication and review quality control processes.
What are publishers doing with ORCID?
The American Psychological Association collects and authenticates ORCID iDs for authors submitting to eight journals in their portfolio. Authors have the option to login with their ORCID iD, fetch ORCID data to complete key fields, and request ORCID iDs for co-authors. “We are invested in the success of ORCID as a means for achieving such goals as comprehensive author disambiguation and a streamlined user experience,” said Melynda Williams, Peer Review Manager at the American Psychological Association.
Taylor & Francis allows authors to connect their ORCID iDs to submission for many journals, as do Cambridge University Press, Maney Publishing, Wiley, and many other publishers.
We are passionate about improving author attribution, and will continue to work with the community to support the adoption of ORCID by both researchers and publishers
