Founded in 2005, the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology (OIST) began as a promotion corporation with the purpose of establishing a university dedicated to contributing to the self-sustaining economic growth of Okinawa and advancement of science and technology worldwide.
Background
In 2011, the promotion corporation was dissolved upon the inauguration of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University. Today, OIST hosts hundreds of researchers from around the world conducting cross-disciplinary research.
Organizational IDs
Organizational IDs are a critical part of adding trustworthy and authoritative information to an ORCID record. As a counterpart to personal identifiers, registries such as ROR, GRID, and Ringgold offer persistent identifiers at the organizational level for research institutions. Making sure an organization’s PID information is accurate is often a requirement when evaluating publication output and tracking the influence of affiliations.
To accurately reflect faculty tenure and staff employment over the change in OIST’s organizational status, we requested changes to the OIST ROR identifier to distinguish it from the previous organization. Using the ROR Updates Tracker, it was possible to track the approval and status of our request. This process took about one month to complete.
OIST and the ORCID Affiliation Manager
Soon after joining the ORCID Japan Consortium, the OIST Graduate University Library utilized Affiliation Manager to write authoritative affiliation data (information about employment and education) to our researcher’s ORCID records, as well as increase engagement with ORCID at OIST. Using two PIDs for each organization, we were able to accurately account for staff that had been employed by both organizations. However, due to limitations in our data exports, it was difficult to account for changes of titles and statuses over time. Therefore, our affiliation data was limited to a snapshot of the organization in its current form.
ORCID offers helpful Outreach Resources to facilitate communicating with users about what ORCID is, how its use can be beneficial, and what the university is asking of them. Applying these recommendations, an informational email was sent to all students and researchers, followed by an individualized email containing the link and instructions to grant OIST trusted access to their ORCID record. In addition, we distributed promotional materials such as posters and a short video around campus to familiarize researchers with ORCID records.
After communicating to researchers about what would be asked of them, about a third of graduate students and staff members granted permission to the university to write affiliation data to their records. We anticipated that many OIST researchers would already have this information in their ORCID record and had previously explained that after we added employment and education information with the Affiliation Manager, many record holders would find a duplicate entry like the example below. We further advised our researchers that they could either delete the self-asserted version of the data or to set its visibility to “Only me.”
It is our hope that by continuing to offer authoritative affiliation data to our researchers’ records, they will save time and effort when reusing that data in other workflows, such as manuscript submission and funding applications, and that more OIST researchers will engage with ORCID in the future.
