More than half our membership is now made up of national or regional consortia. Finland is one of the latest countries to sign a national consortium agreement with ORCID, coordinated by consortium lead CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. Learn more about why and how CSC and the Finnish consortium is partnering with ORCID in this interview with their Development Manager, Hanna-Mari Puuska.
Please can you tell us a bit about CSC – what your organization does and your role there?
CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd – is a non-profit, state-owned company administered by Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. CSC maintains and develops centralized IT infrastructure and provides nationwide IT services for research, libraries, archives, museums and culture. CSC also provides research management information and education. One of CSC’s tasks is to develop and maintain tools for efficient compilation and dissemination of research information; metadata on research projects, researchers, their publications, and research data. I work in our Data Integration and Business Intelligence group, which provides interoperability services for education and research.
When and why did CSC get involved with ORCID?
The Ministry of Education and Culture aims at interoperability between systems and various bodies in education and research. Unique identifiers play an important role in achieving this aim. The Ministry has commissioned CSC to coordinate and promote researcher identification in Finland, after we earlier produced two reports:
- A preliminary study (12/2013) concluded that, of the identification systems available, the international ORCID system provides the best opportunities on a national level
- A report “Introduction of ORCID in Finland” (4/2015) assessed alternative means and proposed actions of implementing ORCID
How does CSC use (or plan to use) ORCID?
CSC’s role is to promote the introduction of ORCID by increasing its awareness among institutions of Finnish higher education, other research organizations and service providers, such as publishers and funders. We have produced Finnish-language material to support research organizations in their ORCID implementation and recently published a Finnish web page including information and guidelines.
CSC provides support (both technical and contextual) for Finnish organizations in integrating ORCID in their systems and processes. We coordinate the national consortium membership of Finnish organizations established on June 2016. Twelve research organizations and CSC have joined the ORCID consortium in the first phase.
CSC has implemented a National Connect Service where a researcher can connect his/her ORCID to the national authentication system (Haka) and through that connect to his/her home organization. This service is particularly aimed at Finnish organizations that don’t have their own CRIS systems.
What impact has ORCID had in your community?
Most research organizations are well aware of the benefits of ORCID. Most of the universities have a CRIS system which supports ORCID and the organizational membership allows them to get full use of their CRIS in terms of ORCID. The challenge is to get research funders more involved in promoting the use of ORCID. Implementing ORCID in more funder systems would help streamline the exchange of research information across funding and reporting systems, replacing the current manual data entry researchers are burdened with.
What can we do to improve our support for your community?
To harness the benefits of ORCID, it is critical that the system becomes better known among researchers and that more researchers actually begin to use it. This should be a collective effort where member organizations play an important role by integrating ORCID IDs to their systems. It is not just about collecting ORCID IDs but providing such services and applications that concretely help researchers in their everyday work, simplify transferring information between various systems, and help researchers to get more credit for their work. The organizations can make good use of ORCID ’s new program – Collect & Connect – which supports this commitment by defining implementation guidelines and a set of best practices for each sector: funders, publishers and research institutions.
