ORCID and GitHub are delighted to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) committing the two organizations to coordinate efforts encouraging the adoption of ORCID iDs through the research data lifecycle. GitHub, part of Microsoft, is a collaborative platform for creating, hosting, managing, and sharing code, used internationally by programmers, researchers, and tech organizations all over the world and is the world’s largest source code host.
Chris Shillum, Executive Director of ORCID said, “Integration between ORCID and GitHub has been one of the most requested features from our community for a number of years, so we are excited to be able to announce this partnership. Ultimately we hope that our collaboration will allow the huge number of people who contribute to research largely or in part through software development to gain better visibility and claim credit for their work.”
Arfon Smith, Product Manager at GitHub added, “Academics and researchers contribute to some of the most influential open source projects on GitHub. By making it possible for researchers to connect an ORCID iD with their GitHub profile we’re raising the visibility of these contributions, and making it easier for others to credit them for their work.”
How ORCID and GitHub will collaborate
Under the MOU, ORCID and GitHub agree to dialogue and cooperation on the following topics:
- Building awareness and encouraging researchers to register for and use their ORCID iD throughout the research data lifecycle.
- Building awareness and support for GitHub-organized events when ORCID is invited to participate as part of GitHub’s panel of experts.
- Sharing of ORCID’s informational and outreach resources with GitHub to help them communicate the value of ORCID to their users and stakeholders to increase adoption.
- Building awareness of GitHub’s ORCID-related developments and initiatives to ORCID’s Member Community with relevant blog posts, social media posts, inclusion in ORCID’s Member Connect newsletter, and/or case studies.
To support these goals, ORCID and GitHub will work together to develop use cases relevant to our shared stakeholder communities and will explore options for coordinated communications regarding existing and upcoming events.
GitHub’s new ORCID integration
As a first step towards greater collaboration, GitHub has developed an integration with ORCID, which allows GitHub users to link their validated ORCID iD to their public GitHub profile. This will help to uniquely identify researchers using GitHub and connect their GitHub profiles to their scholarly other activities, affiliations, and outputs in their ORCID profiles.
How will researchers and ORCID member organizations benefit?
ORCID encourages all researchers who use GitHub to connect their ORCID iDs with their public GitHub profiles using the new integration, and ORCID member organizations to promote awareness of this capability among their researchers. The initial integration allows GitHub users to link and display their ORCID iD on their GitHub profile.
As more researchers take advantage of this capability, we hope to see greater interest from the global research community in a deeper integration between ORCID and GitHub in the future. ORCID and GitHub will engage their respective communities and stakeholder groups on the specific use cases that would define this deeper integration and the data that could be exchanged between the two systems.
If you already have a GitHub account and an ORCID iD, simply sign into GitHub and go to https://github.com/settings/profile to authenticate your ORCID iD. From the settings page, scroll down to the button that says Connect your ORCID iD. Clicking that will take you to the ORCID sign-in page to authorize access. Check out this helpful instruction video to walk through the process. If you still need to register for an ORCID iD, you can do so here.
