ORCID’s Historical Community

The Technical Steering Group provides input and recommendations to the Executive Director on overall technical strategy and priority setting. The Steering Group will create Technical Working Groups as needed to work on specific tasks and deliverables. This group is led by ORCID’s Technical Director and the Group Chair. The Group may create Working Groups to address specific technical challenges.

Participants

• Simeon Warner, Cornell University (Chair)
• Laura Paglione, ORCID Technical Director
• Micah Altman, MIT
• Geoff Bilder, CrossRef
• Jan Dvořák, Univerzita Karlova
• Robert M. Harington, D.Phil., American Mathematical Society
• Ivan Herman, W3C
• Dr. Thorsten Hoellrigl, Thomson Reuters
• Richard A. Ikeda, Ph.D., National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• Gerry Lawson, Center for Ecology and Hydrology (NERC); UberResearch
• Bram Luyten, atMire
• Boaz Nadav Manes, ISNI
• Chris Shillum, Elsevier (Chair)

Strategic Topics

Multiple Assertions Working Group Recommendations by the Multiple Assertions Working Group

Works Metadata Working Group Recommendation by the Works Metadata Working Group

Disambiguation without De-Duplication by Geoffrey Bilder

Group Structure and Governance

Role of Steering Group Chair

The Steering Group Chair should show significant interest and expertise in technical issues related to ORCID. The Chair term is a renewable 1-year appointment. The Chair is expected to:

1. Work with the Technical Director to identify strategic projects and activities important to ORCID’s technical success.
2. Lead Steering Group meetings, ensuring that members are involved and discussion is balanced among members.
3. Bring the Steering Group to consensus on topics of strategic importance, and develop recommendations for the Executive Director. At the discretion of the Executive Director, key recommendations will be brought before the ORCID Board for review and vote.
4. Recognize that leadership role of this type is public and that comments made surrounding the group’s work must be made in context with the larger ORCID vision and mission.
5. Upon reasonable request by the ORCID leadership, offer public comments on behalf of the organization and effort.

Role of Steering Group Member

The members of the Steering Group should have a deep technical understanding and strategic-level perspective of the need for persistent identifiers. Steering Group participation is by 1-year rotating appointments. Steering Group Members are expected to:

1. Represent stakeholders that do not directly sit on the Steering Group.
2. With the Technical Director and Steering Group Chair, participate in developing recommendations to the Executive Director.
3. Participate in online, phone, and in-person discussions about topics of interest to the Steering Group and ORCID technology.
4. Collaborate with the ORCID Technical Community and with other ORCID Working Groups

Steering Group Selection Process

Membership in the Steering Group is by appointment. Self-nominations are accepted. Participants are selected by ORCID leadership.

The Academia & Beyond Task Force was active from May 2019 to November 2019. The following information provides historical reference and context for the now inactive group.

Overview

To achieve our vision of a world where everyone who participates in research is uniquely identified and connected with their affiliations and contributions, we must establish and maintain meaningful channels of engagement with our diverse community. In this project, our focus was on developing strategies for engaging researchers in the arts and humanities, where we have good contacts but had few foundational integrations.

There are a variety of ways researchers in this broad community share their work and, in addition to consultations with community groups, this project sought to analyze disciplinary adoption and use, including through our community survey and ORCID Registry usage patterns. This ensured we took an evidence-based approach to conversations about adoption and enabled us to understand what kinds of information researchers in these disciplines are connecting to their record—or want to—so we could prioritize future communications and technical developments.

We envisaged this dual approach as a test case for future user engagement work with these and other researcher communities.

Approach

We took both a quantitative and qualitative approach to tackling this project, including working with our community partners to:

• Analyze ORCID adoption by the two broad target disciplines, using the 2018 ORCID public data file and including multiple work types, activities, and other data as needed.
• Incorporate relevant demographic questions in the 2019 community survey to enable analysis by broad discipline and ensure we collected data on the broad range of activity and output types.
• Implement a user journey project to understand researcher workflows in the two broad communities, including via the ORCID in Publishing WG UI/UX project to examine researchers’ experience of ORCID during publication.
• Interview community experts representing a wide range of geographies and sectors about their own experience of ORCID and the needs of their communities.
• Interview publishers and other publishing service providers on the way they do or don’t manage authors’ ORCID in their production workflow.
• Assess the adoption and technical implementation of ORCID in various publishing platforms.

Goals

• Understand current and potential future use of ORCID in these two broad communities, as well as barriers to adoption
• Develop prioritized list of recommended enhancements to ORCID functionality to better meet these needs
• Draft, test, and implement communications campaign to expand understanding, use, and adoption of ORCID in these communities
• Use as a test case for future engagement

Governance and Membership

To ensure this was a community-led initiative, we established a discipline-based community task force comprising knowledgeable, well-connected, and influential individuals in academia (and beyond!), who agreed to share their experience and expertise. This group was supported primarily by Alice Meadows (former Director of Communications of ORCID), and included:

• Anne Boddington, Kingston University, UK 
• Kylie Brass, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Australia
• Katherine Burton, Taylor & Francis, UK
• Grace Cho, Artrepreneur, USA
• Peter Cornwell, Data Futures, France
• John Cussans, Independent Researcher, UK
• Milena Grass Kleiner, University of Colombia, Colombia
• Siobhann McCafferty, Australian Research Data Commons, Australia
• Poul Melchiorsen, Aalborg University Library, Denmark
• Pierre Mounier, OpenEdition, France
• Jefferson Pooley, Muhlenberg College, USA
• Ellie Porter, Art 360 Foundation, UK
• Karin Wulf, Omohundro Institute/College of William & Mary (ORCID Board member), USA

The ORCID in Peer Review Task Force was active from February 2019 until November 2019. The following information provides historical reference and context of the now inactive task force.

Peer review is a fundamental part of the research life cycle and one that often goes unrecognized. Our peer review functionality enables two forms of recognition—for individual peer review activities and for ongoing peer review service.

Individual peer review activities can only be added by an ORCID member organization—the organizer of the review or evaluation, such as a publisher, society, funder, or research institution, or a third-party review recognition service, such as Publons, which works with review organizers to recognize your reviews. All ORCID members using API 2.0 onward were able to make use of this functionality, and this task force was charged, in part, with addressing some outstanding issues, in particular around group identifiers.

At the onset of this task force, we offered new affiliation types that enabled recognition for ongoing peer review service. The other purpose of this task force was to work through use cases for different sectors—funding, institutional, publishing—with the goal of implementing at least one as an exemplar.

Membership

• Liz Allen (F1000), UK
• Tony Alves/Dmitri Khodjakov (Aries Systems), USA
• Jason Gush (Royal Society Te Apārangi – corresponding member), New Zealand
• Chris Heid (Clarivate Analytics/ScholarOne), USA
• Sheilagh Molloy (Wellcome Trust), UK
• Elizabeth Moylan (Wiley), UK
• Andrew Preston (Clarivate/Publons), UK
• Imogen Rose (Springer Nature), USA
• Joris van Rossum (Digital Science), Netherlands

The ORCID in Publishing Working Group was active until November 1, 2018. The following information provides historical reference and context of the now inactive group.

The publishing community has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of ORCID. Over 50 publishers have signed the open letter requiring ORCID iDs for authors and pledging to adopt our best practices for publishers. More than 2000 publishers include ORCID iDs in their Crossref metadata, and well over 7000 journals request and include iDs in submission and publication. Publishers are also starting to embed ORCID in their books and conference proceedings workflows, and they have been early adopters of our peer review functionality, with more than quarter of a million review items added to ORCID records. Informal publishing platforms like WordPress and Drupal have also added support for ORCID iD collection, and systems that rely on publication metadata have included ORCID iDs as a core data point for search and grouping.

Since this early adoption, there have been many developments at ORCID:

• We launched the Collect & Connect program to ensure broad understanding and adoption of effective ORCID implementation practices across the research community.
• Auto-update of publications to ORCID records (through organizations like Crossref) has greatly reduced effort for authors and increased the amount of publication data attached to ORCID records – one million DOIs added, and counting!
• Work with user facility and research resource providers in concert with publishers has highlighted the benefits of including resource use in publications.
• The ORBIT project raised expectations of including structured funding data in publications.

Scope

Publishing community knowledge and adoption of these developments had  been uneven, so the purpose of this working group was twofold:

1. Increase knowledge and adoption of new ORCID programs and initiatives by the publishing community
2. Increase ways for the publishing community to inform and support existing and new programs and initiatives

We worked with the group to prioritize a set of key projects, including:

• ORCID UI/UX in publishing: What is the best practice for including an ORCID button in publishing systems? Where does it go, and what is the desired user behavior? What is the interface for collecting information from ORCID records and using it in publishing systems? How can we improve the user experience in publishing workflows, including getting new items added to their records? This project will engage members of the community to explore these topics along with a specialist in the field of UI/UX design. The final deliverables will include a set of guidelines, graphical elements, and a promotion program for adopting the findings.
• Third-party systems: Work collaboratively with third-party system providers in publishing to define core ORCID functionality in publication workflows and deliver a largely consistent experience to end users. We subsequently launched the Certified Service Provider program as a means for ORCID to partner with SPs on their use of ORCID and to make product information more accessible to the ORCID community.
• Requiring ORCID at submission: Do all third-party systems support this currently and, if not, how could it be achieved? Can publishers and service providers do more to promote their ORCID requirement to their user base and to widen uptake, including extending it to co-authors?
• The ORCID experience for readers: How can we maximize the visibility and usefulness of ORCID iDs in published content to encourage readers to use the iD as a rich source of information.
• Adopting ORCID – the publishing roadmap: Where do we want to go and how do we get from here to there? What can publishers do now and what will require more time?
  • We built on a draft roadmap, with the goal of engaging a diverse group of organizations in the discussion to ensure it met the needs of publishers in all regions, those that are large and small, commercial and not-for-profit, and across all types and formats of publication.

Governance

The group was chaired by a member of the ORCID Board. To encourage a “safe space” for frank conversations, discussions during meetings and online conversation were kept confidential; meetings and other communications, including document comments, were considered closed. As with other ORCID groups, activity, status and outcomes of the group were shared with the ORCID Board and the group together determined what could and should be shared more broadly with the community.

Working Group Members

• Alison Mitchell, SpringerNature – Chair (UK)
• Channing Chai, Social Sciences Academic Press (China)
• Chris Heid, Clarivate Analytics (US)
• Laura Jose, Oxford University Press (UK)
• Andrew Joseph, Wits University Press (South Africa)
• Jennifer Kemp, Crossref (US)
• Kerry Kroffe, PLOS (US) 
• Michael Markie, F1000 (UK) 
• Miriam Maus, Wiley (UK) 
• Alex Mendonça, SciELO (Brazil)
• Claire Rawlinson, BMJ (UK)
• Bruce Rosenblum, Inera (US) 

The Funder Working Group was active from December 2017 until September  2019. The following information provides historical reference and context of the now inactive group.

Funders are working with ORCID to enhance our data model and third party service integrations ​to broaden connections to the array of research and career ​data usually contained in grant applications, post award reports, and biographies. We established the Funder Working Group (FWG) to formalize these interactions. The group included funders large and small, national and global, government and charity, disciplinary and broad multidisciplinary.

The primary objective of the FWG was to provide expert input on the ORCID Reducing Burden and Improving Transparency (ORBIT) project, with the goal of improving local and global reusability of research and researcher information by describing and testing opportunities for convenience and efficiency gains in grant application and reporting workflows.

In addition to data model requirements, topics for the ORCID FWG included persistent identifiers for grants, interactions with publishers, data sharing workflows, and administrative burden for researchers. Group members had policy, program, and/or technical expertise. The ORCID project team  brought in additional expertise from the persistent identifier and research information community as needed. 

FWG members

• ALS Association (USA)
• Australian Research Council – ARC (Australia)
• Austrian Science Fund – FWF (Austria)
• BBSRC (UK)
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research – CIHR (Canada)
• CONCYTEC (Peru)
• CONICYT (Chile)
• Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – CNPq (Brazil)
• Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES (Brazil)
• Crossref (UK)
• DataCite (USA)
• Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT (Portugal)
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute – HHMI (USA)
• Japan Science and Technology Agency – JST (Japan)
• Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment – MBIE (New Zealand)
• National Humanities Alliance – NHA (USA)
• National Research Foundation – NRF (South Africa)
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada – NSERC (Canada)
• Science and Technology Development Fund – STDF (Egypt)
• Science Foundation Ireland – SFI (Ireland)
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council – SSHRC (Canada)
• Swiss National Science Foundation – SNF (Switzerland)
• US National Institutes of Health – NIH (USA)
• Wellcome Trust (UK)

More information is available in the full Terms of Reference for the ORCID Funder Working Group.

User facilities are specialized government-sponsored research infrastructure available for external use to advance scientific or technical knowledge. Researchers compete for access to these facilities and specialized equipment. However, these awards for facility access are not regularly captured within the scholarly research workflow. This deficiency makes it difficult for the sponsor agencies and host institutions (typically government laboratories) to report on what papers and products result from their use. Our goal in calling together this Working Group was to ascertain what data would help agencies and facilities to map impact, and to determine whether and how ORCID could enable its collection in a manner that increases data capture and reduces reporting burden for stakeholders. See Publications and User Facilities Working Group for information about the membership and activities of this group.

This working group grew out of the Trust feedback group, established in March 2016. The purpose of the group was to provide ongoing feedback on evolving components of the ORCID Trust program and their effectiveness in achieving program objectives related to privacy, data security, and trust.  Feedback was folded into our Trust program and incorporated into our website and other communications. It also informed our technical strategy.

Ambassador program. From 2013 – 2017, ORCID outreach activities were supported by a diverse cadre of energetic institutional and individual Ambassadors who encouraged the adoption of ORCID identifiers locally and globally. From 2018, with a much larger network of supporters, staff, and members, we are moving to a region- and sector-based community of practice approach, driven by our network of partners and consortia. We are extremely grateful to all our ambassadors for their hard work, advocacy, and support.

• Business Steering Group
• Communications Steering Group (formerly the Outreach Steering Group)

• API Working Group (2014)
• Multiple Assertions Working Group (2014)
• Works Metadata Working Group (2013/2014)
• Registry Stability Working Group (2012/2013)
• Launch Working Group (2012)
• Launch Partners Beta Group (2012)

• ORCID in Repositories Task Force (2018/2019) [Report] [blog post]
• Organization Identifier Working Group (2017)
• ORCID in books workflows (2016/2017)
• Displaying iDs in journal articles (2016/2017)
• ORCID Cash Management (2017)
• ORCID Membership and Fees (2017)
• ORCID Privacy Committee (2012)

ORCID was a participant in the ODIN Project, the ORCID and DataCite Interoperability Network, a two-year project that started in September 2012, funded by the European Commission’s ‘Coordination and Support Action’ under the FP7 programme.  Our ODIN partners are innovators in science, information science and the publishing industry and include CERN, the British Library, DataCite, Dryad, arXiv and the Australian National Data Service.

The THOR Project was a 30-month project funded by the European Commission H2020 program.  Our THOR partners included British Library, CERN, EBI/EMBL, DataCite, Dryad, Pangaea, and the Australian National Data Service.
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