Nominations Now Open for ORCID Board Elections 2020

I am delighted to announce the start of this year’s search for dynamic and enthusiastic individuals from across the research community to join the ORCID Board.

Every year the ORCID Board nominations process gives the ORCID membership a direct voice in the organization’s governance. The Board’s composition and annual elections are an important part of ORCID’s charter, and the election process is a fantastic opportunity to ensure that ORCID grows and develops in close partnership with its members.

As this year’s Chair of the Nominations Committee, I look forward to working closely with the other Committee members, who represent an excellent variety of organizations, member types, and regions. They are:

• Heath Marks, Australian Access Federation (Australia)
• Daisy Selematsela, UNISA (South Africa)
• Simeon Warner, Cornell University (USA)
• Karin Wulf, College of William & Mary (USA)
• Shouguang Xie, Social Sciences Academic Press (China)
• Kazutsuna Yamaji, National Institute of Informatics (Japan)

The role of the Nominations Committee is to select a ‘slate’ of candidates that is balanced and diverse, taking into account different sectors, regions, skills, and non-profit status requirements as established in the ORCID bylaws, and we are also seeking to make the Board more representative of our community’s demographics. New Board members should ideally offer perspectives that are not represented (or fully represented) on the ORCID Board, and you can see the make-up of the current Board here.

Other than two unaffiliated researcher member positions (one of which will be open for this year’s election process), ORCID Board members must be from current ORCID member organizations, all of which are eligible to nominate representatives to serve on the Board. New Board members will serve for a period of three years, starting from the February 2020 Board meeting. They are expected to attend each of three annual Board meetings in person, and to play an active role in ORCID activities during the course of their term. To help achieve our goal of broad representation across sectors and regions, from 2020 we are introducing a Board Meeting Attendance Fund, to reduce financial barriers to participation in Board governance.  For more information about the roles and responsibilities of ORCID Board Directors, please see the Elections web page.

Please send us your recommendations for new ORCID Board members using this form. You can nominate yourself or (with their permission) another individual, Please be sure to tell us what strengths you would bring to the Board, and why you’re interested in serving. We will consider all recommendations received by August 1, 2019.

The slate will be presented to the current Board for approval at our September meeting, after which it will be announced publicly. The community has the choice of either voting on the slate or proposing additional candidates (within 30 days of the slate being announced), in which case the election will become a plurality vote by candidate. To propose additional candidates, a group of 20 or more members must submit a nomination in writing to ORCID before October 22, 2019. Note that the group may not include more than one member per consortium (for specific details, see Article III Section 2b of ORCID’s Bylaws). We will send notifications and open the election by electronic ballot later in October.

The full process is summarized below:

ORCID Board 2020 Election Key Dates

We look forward to receiving your recommendations over the coming months.

Please contact the nominating committee with any questions, or feel free to reach out to me directly. When voting opens, ORCID will be sending proxies to each main contact listed on ORCID membership agreements. If you would like to update your membership contact information at any time between now and then, please contact ORCID Support.