Enabling transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers and their contributions and affiliations is at the center of ORCID’s mission. These connections allow researchers to not only be recognized for the many different types of valuable contributions they make to the scholarly record, it also creates transparency around which institutions are funding the work and employing the researchers.
Listening to our community to improve ORCID records
ORCID’s efforts to expand and refine the way we describe these types of connections began in 2017 when, after consultation with our community, we added new affiliation types that can be added to ORCID records in order to recognize researchers’ professional activities. Now, six years later, following further feedback from our community and the great insights of our Researcher Advisory Council (ORAC), we have moved these professional activity affiliation types into a new section within the ORCID record called Professional activities. These activities are Membership, Service, Invited Positions, and Distinctions.
The Professional activities section now more accurately categorizes a researcher’s activities, and gives a clearer picture of the record at a glance.
Professional activities
Membership: Paid or gratis membership of a society or association (i.e. does not include honorary memberships and fellowships as defined under Invited Position and Distinctions)
Service: Significant donations of time, money, or other resources to an organization or community. Includes volunteer work such as society officer positions, agricultural extension work, other voluntary work.
Invited positions: An invited non-employment affiliation. The individual may be based at a different organization. This category includes formal acknowledgements of an individual’s academic efforts through honorary titles and/or positions which require no specific service. May be paid or unpaid.
Distinctions: For honorary and other awards, distinctions, and prizes made by an organization in recognition of an individual’s academic or other achievements.
The Professional activities section can be found under the Activities part of the ORCID record.
It’s important to note that this change is only applicable to the interface of the ORCID record itself. Member integrators that are using our Member API or Affiliation Manager can still read and write to these sections of an ORCID record in the same way as before.
In the ORCID record interface, each type of professional activity has its own representative icon that is displayed to the left of the activity. (See screenshot below.) Like all other activity items listed on the record, users have the ability to sort the professional activities by title, type, start, or end dates.
Of course, users can still manually add these activities to their records by simply clicking + Add within the professional activities header. A dropdown of the activities types will be shown, and, once chosen, the existing form will be displayed for the user to populate.
Moving these affiliations to a new section of the ORCID record is just part of the continual work we do to improve the overall user experience of ORCID records. Based on our work with our Researcher Advisory Council, we believe this change, while seemingly minor, will help researchers more easily stand out in a competitive field and we are excited for its release.
If you want to be kept up to date about our new feature releases, be sure to visit our Feature Friday page and sign up for updates to our blog.
