We are proud to announce our first round of Global Participation Fund awardees!
Last year, we launched ORCID’s Global Participation Fund (GPF)—one of the initiatives of our new Global Participation Program—to provide grants under two different programs as a means of improving understanding and encouraging uptake of ORCID in under-represented countries in the Global South.
The Community Development and Outreach program supports local partners to build ORCID Communities of Practice in currently under-represented regions; and supports local outreach, training, and tech support resources for the creation and growth of ORCID consortia that serve those regions.
Grants from the Technical Integration program can be used to fund software development to build and update ORCID integrations in open-source systems. This will foster participation in ORCID in currently under-represented regions and support the creation of technical documentation, outreach, and support for resources created through the grants.
ORCID has selected the following five projects to receive funding for the first round of GPF grants:
Community Development and Outreach Grant Recipients
Eko-Konnect Research and Education Initiative will initiate a campaign on the importance of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for scholarly research output for Open Science. Webinars, along with physical workshops, will be hosted in campuses of the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. Additionally, they will engage with the education funding agency and other government agencies via a symposium to obtain their commitment for support of infrastructure, systems, and consortium driven by ORCID and other PIDs in creating a viable national Open Science ecosystem for Nigeria.
Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium will host a training of trainers and 21 librarians to develop an ORCID Community of Practice among librarians, who are key to implementing research visibility and discoverability. The consortium will also conduct sensitization and advocacy among directors of research. They intend to upgrade and integrate 21 institutional repositories developed in a previous project with ORCID API. Training materials for self-learning will be developed and hosted on the KLISC website. An increased number of ORCID registrations and system integrations is expected.
AfricArXiv – pan-African Open Access portal will establish ORCID-facilitated multi-stakeholder consortia for efficient scholarly knowledge sharing from Africa, utilizing scholarly repository systems (OSF, Figshare, ScienceOpen, PubPub), each with a regional and research topic/discipline-specific focus. Apart from ORCID, they will integrate and advocate for the adoption of other relevant persistent identifiers—ROR in particular—for African institutional reputation building, complementing the existing institutional infrastructure.
The Université Virtuelle De Côte D’Ivoire aims to expand ORCID practice in Côte d’Ivoire, where they are facing challenges around research results and data visibility, as well as accessibility, publishing and knowledge sharing, reuse of scientific outputs, ethics and equity, etc. It is a great opportunity to build an ORCID Community of Practice to enhance research and researchers’ visibility. They hope to strengthen existing initiatives, such as the National Repository, local academic journals, and in general raise awareness and build capacity.
Technical Integration Grant Recipient
Technische Universität Hamburg aims to improve the ORCID login process to DSpace-CRIS, which is challenging for new users and existing users who have not yet connected their account to ORCID. This project will directly benefit all users of DSpace around the world, including numerous in the fund focus group.
Considering the quality and number of applications we received during this first call for proposals, ORCID is confident that the GPF is well-aligned with the needs of the global research community. The technical implementation will be conducted by 4Science, which has been contracted for project development. We are excited to share the progress of these inaugural projects over the next months, and we encourage you to check back as we issue new calls for proposals. We anticipate the next application period to open in this spring, so stay tuned!
