On 8 May, Jisc and ARMA co-hosted a kickoff meeting for their ORCID pilot project. The goal of the project is to explore opportunities and challenges in integrating ORCID identifiers into research management systems and workflows at higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK. The kickoff meeting provided an opportunity for HEIs to present their plans and identify connections with other project participants. Over the course of the project, each participating HEI is tasked with developing use cases, blogging on their experiences, and contributing to a business case appraising options for a nation-wide implementation of ORCID.
The project participants presented a variety of plans for working with ORCID identifiers. Among the benefits mentioned were supporting open access initiatives on campus, improving the ease of publication management, and reducing the administrative reporting burden for their staff and researchers.
- Aston University will be incorporating ORCID into a significant open access communications campaign planned for the next year. Aston will be piloting ORCID registration using facilities in PURE, their research management system. The registration process will be supported by targeted in-house training and online guidance notes. Aston intends to embed ORCID IDs into the HR system (CORE) to register new staff joining the university.
- Imperial College is interested in the potential ORCID affords for to helping both the individual authors and College to capture research outputs of its academic staff and to reduce administrative workload around scholarly communication. Imperial plans to pilot ORCID in two departments to test de-duplication (for staff who already have an ORCID) and systems integration into Symplectic Elements, their common research information system (CRIS).
- University of Kent is focusing their ORCID pilot on researchers early in their careers (ECRs). This group are often very mobile at the early stages of their career so a persistent identifier linked to their PhD thesis and in all publications from the beginning of their career can be particularly useful. Kent will be integrating ORCID into their ePrints institutional repository (IR), Kent Academic Repository, in the submission process for electronic research theses and in their CONVERIS CRIS, KRIMSON, to examine the potential use of ORCID to aid effective reporting internally, back to funders, HEFCE, HESA and other agents.
- University of Oxford will be releasing a demonstrator of its lightweight model for enabling individual ORCIDs to be linked to university personal profiles, part of which will explore the options for data synchronization and managed verification of affiliation. The Oxford discussions are taking place in close collaboration with Oxford University Press (OUP), a member of ORCID that implemented ORCID IDs in its journal submission systems in early 2014.
- Northumbria University will be exploring implementation of ORCID at different stages of researcher career paths and throughout the research cycle. Their first use case will add the identifier as an additional field in the postgraduate research student record for submission as part of the 2014 HESA return, thereby testing the notion that establishing registration closer to the source of data flow through the enterprise architecture most effectively streamlines multiple applications. The second use case will incorporate ORCID as part of a family of registration standards supported by the Scholarly Publications team in the University Library as part of a new digital publication service for Faculty run Open Access journal titles, thereby capturing external as well as internal authors.
- Southampton University is planning a roll out of ORCID ID for all researchers with institution-wide impetus, to test a specific workflow for the equipment focussed research community, and to develop services to support cultural engagement and researcher-led uptake. The use case will demonstrate the power of the ORCID ID to maximise links between the researcher’s identity, the researcher’s outputs, the researcher’s use of equipment/facilities, the necessary use of institutional systems and potential enhancements to the availability of data for national services and leverages the Soton ePrints repository.
- Swansea University will be building ORCID registration into their bespoke university research information system, HR and AMS systems, and their Institutional Repository. Their project will include requiring ORCID in their university publication processes and a consideration of ORCIDs role alongside other online systems and protocols to enhance machine readable and harvestable research outputs, including the ability to track longitudinally the research and scholarship of post-graduate researchers (PGRs). Swansea intends to work across Wales with the Welsh Repository Network sites and to compare our approach with two of our partner groups in the University of Grenoble, France and with the University of Texas, US.
- University of York will be focusing their pilot on the benefits ORCID brings to its researchers. Advocacy and consultation with the research community will be central to the process. Benefits for the University would then follow, e.g. improved data capture, tracking outputs, improving open access monitoring, identifying impact, easier reporting to funders and sharing of information between systems. York will be utilizing their Research Information System, Pure to manage the staff member authority records and the ORCID registration process. Information about research outputs from the University is automatically shared between Pure and White Rose Research Online, our shared ePrints repository. Using ORCID to help with this interoperation is a real potential benefit and an important part of the project.
More details about the project and the participating organizations is available on the Jisc ORCID pilot project Webpage. A mid-term project meeting is planned for September, and a final project summary meeting in January 2015.