In the first quarter of 2022, our Product Interest Group session revealed big plans for this year’s improvements to the registry. Even if you missed the session, you can still catch it on our Vimeo channel. Below is a roundup of what our product team is working hard to roll out to keep pace with the needs of our community.
Improve co-author workflow
After extensive reviews of the co-author workflow, the product team identified ways to improve the visibility of contributors within the registry data and is rolling out changes in a phased approach.
Phase 1 – Change in the way we display contributor data on ORCID records. This first phase is now complete.
Phase 2 – Allow users to enter their own contributor role when manually adding works.
Phase 3 – Allow users to enter co-author data when manually adding works.
Phase 4 – Creating contributor lists which can be used when manually adding works.
Phase 5 – Make the contributor lists available to members via a new API endpoint.
This is challenging work. Contributors and co-authors comprise the single biggest set of data within the ORCID registry. In some disciplines, papers and datasets can have thousands of collaborators. For example, there is a record for an astrophysicist with around 600 works with 1.7 million contributors between them. That’s an average of 3,000 contributors per work!
Our efforts are ongoing, but we’re confident we will get there.
Improve the new-user journey
We will continue to improve the experience for our new users, especially those who are unfamiliar with ORCID and need help to quickly build an effective, impactful record that is ready to use in a variety of workflows.
By introducing a number of new features such as in-app messaging and guided app tours, we’ll support researchers new to ORCID through the early stages of creating their record. Highlighting the values and benefits of completing the different record areas will give new users added impetus to get up and running as quickly as possible. Emphasis will be placed on encouraging users to connect to services and integrations and start pulling in affiliations, works, and other activities early on.
We hope that simplifying these initial interactions will give a positive first impression to new ORCID users and encourage continuing active use of their record.
Building on Member Portal Services
We will continue to develop a number of Member Portal Services alongside affiliation manager and member reporting. Again, we plan to deliver these services in a phased approach:
Phase 1 – Allow members to manage their ORCID member contacts. Allow consortia leads to manage their own ORCID member contacts as well as their consortium member contacts.
Phase 2 – Allow members to manage their publicly displayed information that shows up on the ORCID member list. Allow consortia leads and consortia members to manage their own publicly displayed information..
Phase 3 – Provide the ability for all members to manage their own API credentials including updating redirect URLs.
Phase 4 – Provide improved member reporting to premium members and certified service providers.
API version 4.0
We sent our first product survey to all our members in March to gauge areas for improvement. Some of the questions we asked include:
- What changes would you like to see to the functionality in our features?
- Are there any changes that you would like to see in the next API version?
- What do you like and dislike?
We are currently working through the 88 responses and compiling areas of priority. Areas under consideration include:
- Better support for representing editorships. We realize that editorships are a professional activity that is more similar in scope to peer review than an affiliation. We hope to make this clearer in the UI and API. At the same time we will make it possible to represent editorships with only an ISSN and without requiring an organization ID.
- Better handling of e-ISSN to p-ISSN mappings for peer review. At the moment, peer reviews for a single journal can appear in different places within the peer review section of an ORCID record. We’re going to try and resolve this using L-ISSNs.
- Including linked organization identifiers in API responses (i.e. ROR, GRID and RINGGOLD). Most organizations have multiple organization IDs. We will make it easier for integrators by providing the mapping directly in our API responses.
- Including the first 10 contributors in Works summaries. This should significantly reduce the number of calls integrators need to make.
- Including the affiliation URL in affiliation summaries. This should reduce the number of calls integrators need to make.
- Support for CRediT roles only. We will only allow CRedIT contributor roles to be added for works.
- Support for affiliations that do not have a country or city. Some organizations are “virtual,” and we need to do a better job of enabling researchers to connect with them.
Affiliation Manager improvements
We wanted to assess how to use the ORCID registry notifications from within the Affiliation Manager to alert users that their home organization would like to update their ORCID record. In short—we discovered it can be done. This update will go live toward the end of June, and we think this will make the process of adding affiliations via the affiliation manager much easier for administrators by reducing the number of emails that organizations are required to send. It will also make the process more effective in terms of the number of researchers granting permission.
Accessibility audit
One of ORCID’s four strategic priorities is Increasing Global Participation. While the high-level interpretation of this principle would be the expansion of ORCID uptake around the world, it also encapsulates our firmly-held belief that ORCID should be available to all, regardless of location, bandwidth, technology, or physical or cognitive barriers.
This year we are partnering with The Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC) to complete a full accessibility audit of the ORCID registry. DAC was chosen for its deep understanding of digital accessibility, along with a unique approach to testing that puts real users at the heart of the auditing process.
The initial audit is now complete and we will be working closely with DAC and our tech team to create actionable steps for implementation. Expect a concerted focus on accessibility improvements in the ORCID registry in the latter-half of 2022.
As always, we are committed to continuing to improve the user experience, and this major undertaking could not have been completed without the substantive feedback from our community. Thank you for taking time to answer the questions from our survey, and please continue to send us your ideas for other areas we can improve. We value our community’s feedback to make ORCID an increasingly valuable tool to advance scientific research around the world.
