Through the OpenAIRE EXPLORE discovery service, ORCID users can now instantly identify their works and quickly add them to their ORCID iD through a trusted and straightforward process.
OpenAIRE, the European e-Infrastructure on open scholarly communication, is a service provider with 14 services covering a broad spectrum of open science for publishing, discovering, and monitoring research. In its core is the OpenAIRE Research Graph which interlinks 124M publications, 1M research data, and 78K research software, with researchers, their organizations, funding agencies, and specific research communities. It is so simple to set up—let’s get going!
Connect in three easy steps
- Create or log into your ORCID account
This article assumes that the reader does own an ORCID account, but if you don’t, you can register at https://orcid.org/register, as this will be important in all future aspects of scholarly communication.
- Create or log into your OpenAIRE account
Sign in to the OpenAIRE EXPLORE portal using a variety of options: your email, EDUGAIn, ORCID, Gmail, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. This will grant you access to services such as linking and claiming, and/or it will enable you to grant OpenAIRE the permission to add, delete, or edit work that is connected with your ORCID record.
- Grant OpenAIRE as your trusted organization
Lastly, you need to grant OpenAIRE the right to act as a trusted organization on your behalf in order to apply changes in your ORCID record. First, a popup window directing you to ORCID will appear, asking you to login to or register for ORCID and then allow OpenAIRE to read trusted information and/or add or update research activities. This will happen even though you may have used your ORCID iD to login to OpenAIRE, so don’t worry about possible repetitions.
Entry points
To assist users in accessing the new functionalities, both ORCID and OpenAIRE provide entry points. Users can connect their iD:
- from the ORCID user interface, or
- from OpenAIRE EXPLORE pages.
Access wizard through ORCID
As an ORCID user, when you browse your Works section in https://orcid.org/my-orcid, click the “Add works” button and search for the “OpenAIRE EXPLORE” member organization in the drop down list.
You will then be redirected to a page in OpenAIRE EXPLORE, where you can search and add works to your ORCID iD among all research outcomes (e.g., publications, research data, software or other research products) related to you.
Access wizard through OpenAIRE EXPLORE
Option 1: Directly on the results of the OpenAIRE EXPLORE search pages.
Associate scholarly work with your ORCID iD as a signed-in OpenAIRE EXPLORE user.
A nice tip to make use of the new functionalities is to search for your name as an author of publications as in the image above (we used “Paolo Manghi”). OpenAIRE EXPLORE shows you a list of articles that could be related with your name. You can now control and verify which articles are related with you and indicate so. How to do that? It’s simple. In the search results page, in the box that contains information about the research result next to your name, you simply click on the “Add to ORCID”. That’s it! Now the publication is added among your works in your ORCID record.
Disassociate scholarly works from your ORCID iD. If you want to remove an associated work from your ORCID iD, select the “Delete from ORCID” button.
Option 2: Directly on the publication of the OpenAIRE EXPLORE landing page
Associate your scholarly work with your ORCID iD. If you already know and want to add a specific publication to your ORCID record, search for the publication in OpenAIRE EXPLORE and view its landing page. Once you sign in, you will notice the “ADD TO ORCID” button enabled on the top right section of the page (see image below).
Important: The button is enabled only for registered and signed-in users.
Clicking on this button, you can verify that you are an author (or co-author) and you add this publication in your works list of your ORCID record.
Disassociate scholarly works from your ORCID iD. If you think that a publication or other research result is not part of your work, then you may remove it by simply pressing the “DELETE FROM ORCID” button on the top right corner of the landing page.
Manage your OpenAIRE ORCID links
Once you grant access to OpenAIRE, you will see a link to the “My ORCID links” page on the user menu under your name (top right) where you can find all the works you have added to your ORCID record through the OpenAIRE EXPLORE Portal. This is your personal control and overview page where you may be prompted to discover more results to add.
There are three main actions you can perform:
- View ORCID work: quick preview of the information stored in your ORCID record for this work.
- Update ORCID work: update information previously added to your ORCID record for this work (i.e., if current information in OpenAIRE is enriched).
- Delete from ORCID: remove this work from your ORCID record.
What are the green and black ORCID iD icons for authors?
While navigating through OpenAIRE EXPLORE, you will notice that in some cases, an author’s name is accompanied by a green or a black ORCID iD icon. As OpenAIRE collects metadata information from various sources (see OpenAIRE Research Graph for more details), we need to indicate the authoritativeness of the ORCID iD match:
- A green ORCID iD icon means that the information on OpenAIRE is harvested or already verified from the ORCID Public Data File.
- A black ORCID iD icon means that the information on OpenAIRE is derived by OpenAIRE algorithms or is harvested from 3rd party repositories and is not yet verified from the ORCID Public data file.
As soon as OpenAIRE synchronizes its data with ORCID, your ORCID links will be visible in the OpenAIRE research results, and your name will be marked with the authorized, green ORCID iD icon.
The research outcomes with the green icon next to your name are already in your ORCID record (manually or from other sources), but you can still import them from OpenAIRE EXPLORE. You can also add research outcomes marked with the black icon and validate them as yours.
Takeaway
The integration between OpenAIRE EXPLORE and ORCID Search & Link is a step towards interconnecting services within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the global open science ecosystem. It helps researchers identify, verify, and add all types of works (e.g., publications, research data, software, etc., open or closed) in their ORCID records in a trusted manner and with the minimum time and effort spent. With the inherent links to different organizations, it helps institutions and funders identify the outcomes of their collective work.
It is important to stress the role of both the OpenAIRE Research Graph, that aggregates collections of research data properties, and ORCID, a key service of the research community in transparent and trustworthy identification of researchers and their works.
We are excited to offer this new functionality to researchers. Both OpenAIRE and ORCID welcome feedback so we may further strengthen and expand our collaboration in ways that bring value to the research community and reduce the burden on researchers.