We recently launched a new webinar series—“I’m a Member, Now What?!”—to focus on different subjects that will help new members get the most out of their memberships and accelerate their integration development and uptake of ORCID within their organizations. The first webinar, held on 28 July, was all about “Help & Support,” and in it, we familiarized participants with resources and support ORCID makes available to our members.
This blog post contains some of the information we shared in that webinar—we hope you find it helpful, whether you’re a new ORCID member or have been an ORCID member for years!
Whether consortium or direct, we welcome you to the ORCID member community! ORCID is a member-based organization that stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, and although researchers are the center of our mission, our members comprise a wide variety of organizations that are part of the global research community. Our members are universities and research institutions, publishers and professional associations, funders, facilities, government agencies, service providers, commercial businesses, and other stakeholders in the research ecosystem.
This blog will focus on how new consortium and direct members can get the most out of their ORCID membership and where to begin. We also invite you to sign up for the “I’m a Member, Now What?!” webinar series, and watch the first recorded session on the topic of Help & Support, as well as refer to our Help & Support handout for new members.
All new members
Before we dive into specific steps for consortium and direct members, know that all of our members get access to the following:
- our Member API (Application Programming Interface), which allows your systems and applications to connect to the ORCID registry, which is an open, interconnected hub of profile data. By integrating with ORCID, you can contribute a variety of items, including affiliation data, and extend the reach of your systems. Sharing data with ORCID can help you to avoid being locked into costly, proprietary systems;
- participation in ORCID’s governance. ORCID is community-built and community-governed. Representatives from our member organizations are eligible for nomination to serve on our Board of Directors and can vote in the annual board elections. (See our bylaws.);
- help with your integration development from our dedicated support team, including preparation for launches and releases with user acceptance testing;
- on-demand member and integration reports containing insightful data about how integrations are being used, such as how many researchers have connected their iDs to an integration, and how many records have been updated via the integration;
- our monthly newsletter called ORCID Member Connect, with timely information for our member communities. If there is special news or events you would like to share with the wider community, reach out to [email protected] and we’ll help promote it in the newsletter.
Additionally, we have online spaces where our members can connect with other members to ask questions, receive feedback, or simply engage with the wide world of ORCID enthusiasts seeking efficiencies and solutions to meet their organizational needs.
Community Forum is a place where members can learn about the latest news and connect with other members.
Friends of ORCID (Slack) is a channel where members can interact with each other, provide and get feedback, and get information from the community.
Help Center is a place where members can access information and FAQs pool about technical and non-technical topics.
Outreach Resources is a place where members can receive information that might be useful about communicating to users throughout your ORCID integration development project.
Lastly, we encourage you to follow us on social! You can find us as @ORCID_org on Twitter and ORCID on LinkedIn, where we will post content to connect our wider community.
New consortium members
Your first steps as a consortium member will be to send your consortium lead the internal documentation they ask you for, which varies from consortium to consortium and is independent of ORCID’s processes. Next, you will send your consortium lead your contact details and organization description for ORCID’s internal set-up. Finally, you will get an onboarding call with your consortium lead to discuss general questions, plans with ORCID, which may cover use tools, integration with the API or other topics.
Next up, it’s important to know the available resources that consortium members have as part of their suite of benefits. In order to maintain a good workflow so members can access the help they need more quickly, here’s a rundown of how consortium members interact with their consortium lead.
- The Consortium Lead is available for regular exchanges with the other members in the consortium and they are well-equipped to answer many of your basic questions.
- When getting set up, the Consortium Lead is available to help with understanding your organization’s integration, so if you need help mapping out the workflow or seeing how other institutions have handled similar issues, they are a great place to gather information.
- Occasionally there are questions that new members have that will be more technical than what the Consortium Lead can answer. The Consortium Lead will be the one to escalate those questions to ORCID.
- If your consortium has already been established, it’s possible they will already have a vast knowledge bank of useful information, so please do not hesitate to work with fellow members to find common solutions and approaches.
- Lastly, participating in consortium events and community calls can be a great way to stay in the loop and connected to the latest ORCID developments relevant to your organization.
New direct members
For direct members, your Engagement Lead will be your direct point of contact with ORCID for all matters. In the beginning, you’ll have a virtual onboarding orientation customized for your organization’s needs. After that, ORCID will offer support as needed during the planning of your integration, such as what workflows make sense for your situation.
After the integration is built and is ready to write data to the registry, members will connect with their community, such as faculty, staff, grant awardees, etc. who they want to engage with ORCID. As more and more members of your community adopt ORCID and more data gets written, your organization may want to access specific types of reports to measure progress, which is always accessible through the Member Portal.
Along the way, you will always be able to receive direct implementation support from the our support team, as well as invitations to ORCID member-only events, such as town hall meetings where you can learn about ORCID news and new feature roll-outs.
We’re glad you joined us for the journey!
ORCID is a global not-for-profit organization sustained by fees from our member organizations. In other words, we could not do what we do without you! Members span a wide representation of stakeholders, but all together they allow us to pursue our vision of a world where everyone who participates in research, scholarship, and innovation is uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.
It is our promise to you that we will always strive 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. We invite you to read more about our mission, vision, plans, and values here.
ORCID is proud of our history of being built for and by our community, so once you get familiar with your own integration, we welcome you to share your suggestions on how to improve the ORCID registry or services by providing different types of feedback to our Product team. We are an open source community, and members can help us improve the ORCID experience!
In the meantime, we hope that you will register for the next, “I’m a Member, Now What?! webinar, which will take place on 29 September and will focus on using the Member Portal.
