At the time of writing, there are 130 million works in the ORCID registry attached to 5.8 million researchers, including journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, datasets, and software artifacts. Works are added to ORCID records in two distinct ways: automatically, when added by an ORCID member organization; or manually, by the researcher adding the work themselves. However they are added, an important element of the metadata associated with works is the work type, which is critical to allow the re-use and interoperability of the work data in the ORCID registry.
Highlights
Many work types that are important in humanities and arts disciplines are currently not well represented in the ORCID registry, so ORCID is not as useful as it might be to researchers in those fields.
ORCID invites community input to our discussion as we develop our policy and process around including new work types.
For interoperability and quality purposes, whenever possible, ORCID aims to adopt external community standards for controlled metadata vocabularies that are maintained by groups of experts. When ORCID was first launched, we adopted the CASRAI vocabulary for work types. Unfortunately, however, the CASRAI initiative was not sustained, and it is no longer maintained as a stand-alone vocabulary.
Over the years, we added several work types to the ORCID registry in an ad-hoc manner to support our community’s needs, including: software, pre-prints, annotations, data management plans, reviews, and physical objects. While useful in the short-term, this resulted in the ORCID work type vocabulary drifting out of alignment with community standards. More significantly, many work types which are important in humanities and arts disciplines are missing from the current vocabulary, meaning that these works are currently not well represented in the ORCID registry and ORCID is not as useful as it might be to researchers in those fields.
In order to address these deficiencies, we are now developing an updated, community-validated policy for which work types we support, why we support them, and a documented mechanism for new additions to be considered. We are proposing to expand our work type vocabulary and map it to a subset of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) resource types list, while taking care to maintain backwards compatibility with our current vocabulary.
We welcome your feedback!
Please join us in the discussion document defining our goals and objectives, background for how ORCID has managed and expanded Work Types in the registry so far, a proposal for new, merged, and legacy Work Types, as well as a current and proposed new user interface.
We invite you to leave comments directly in the documents. Including your name and affiliation in your comments can be helpful in continuing a dialogue with us about your feedback, so we invite you to do that if you wish.The document will be open for comments until 31 August 2024. Stay tuned for more information on our plans to release new Work Types soon.
