ORCID for Consortia: Building a Successful Consortium
The process of forming a new consortium requires commitment and some effort, but don’t worry; we are here to work with you every step of the way.
Are you ready to form your own ORCID consortium?
The process of forming a new consortium requires commitment and some effort, but don’t worry; we are here to work with you every step of the way. This page provides some things for you to consider before we start working together.
If your organization already collaborates with other organizations on research infrastructure and scholarly communications topics and has a general perspective of what they can do, you may be a good candidate to form a consortium.
Start the conversation with ORCID
Consortia start locally with conversations to engage stakeholders in the community, to develop a regional or national strategy and policy for engaging with ORCID, and to identify the organization that will lead the consortium. We encourage you to invite ORCID into these as early as possible to help answer your questions and guide the conversation in the most efficient way possible. We can also make introductions to other consortia with similar goals and provide resources (and encouragement) as needed.
Some strategic topics we will need to explore include:
- Do you have national open research goals?
- Are you seeking to improve the sharing of research information?
- Are you developing a strategy to implement FAIR principles?
- Which organizations are part of these goals? How does ORCID fit into these objectives?
- What systems or processes are targeted for an ORCID integration?
- What questions do you have about how ORCID works?
- Which organization(s) are well-positioned to serve as a lead organization?
Identify a Consortium Lead Organization
Each ORCID consortium must have a Consortium Lead Organization, whose role is to catalyze the adoption of ORCID in their community. The Consortium Lead Organization is responsible for:
- Providing administrative support to their consortium;
- Managing and supporting the onboarding of consortium members;
- Employing dedicated support staff;
- Developing shared resources, communication materials and events;
- Maintaining consortium documentation; and
- Working with the community to identify goals, develop policy and governance, and establish regular progress reporting to members and ORCID.
Consortium Lead Organizations should also be involved in establishing local governance of the consortium to oversee progress and support conversations about national or regional research policy and cross-sector engagement.
In addition to ensuring appropriate community support staffing, Consortium Lead Organizations serve as a bridge with ORCID, acting as national or regional liaisons and accelerating the understanding of best practice and speed with which consortium members adopt and integrate ORCID. They help to develop and maintain a community of practice, building on findings and lessons learned across the community and translate them into locally relevant practices for engaging users, integrating identifiers into systems, and encouraging external platform providers to connect identifiers into their systems.
Consider models for providing community support
To qualify for the discounted consortia fee, the Consortium Lead Organization must implement the relevant support and services (including, without limitation, the technical support to be provided by the Consortium Lead Organization) within 90 days of the consortium effective date found in the ORCID Consortium Lead Agreement. Therefore it’s critical to give this ample consideration as early as possible. This role is responsible for providing support to consortium members for outreach and technical implementation, not direct end-user support. See the section on Roles and Responsibilities for more details.
Best practices for providing support
Based on the experience of existing ORCID consortia, we recommend having dedicated staff, at least for the first three years of the consortium while members are actively working on their outreach and integration plans.
Consortia with dedicated staff can provide valuable additional in-person outreach efforts.
Community support coverage should be available on all weekdays, even if only part time.
The community support role comprises mostly outreach and community engagement, with about 30% time dedicated to tier 1 technical issues. Key skills and experience for this role include:
- Customer support experience
- Experience organizing and facilitating workshops
- Demonstrated knowledge of scholarly metadata and formats such as XML or JSON (familiarity with web page development, such as HTML and, basic CSS can be helpful)
- Familiarity with research infrastructure
- Familiarity with writing documentation
- Open, flexible, and engaged attitude to learning new skills and technologies, e.g. APIs
- An understanding of and commitment to ORCID’s vision and mission
- ORCID will provide training for consortium community support staff and others who will be supporting member integrations. Standard training includes three 1.5 – 2 hours training webinars plus supporting documentation. These cover:
- General overview of ORCID
- Technical overview of our APIs and tools
- Overview of outreach methods and materials
- Homework (which ORCID will review and provide feedback on)
- Reading list and other resources
The ORCID Engagement team (including Member Technical Support Specialists) shadows new consortium staff for the first 1-2 months, including regular check-ins, assistance with planning consortium webinars, and development of a consortium FAQ. ORCID will continue to interact with consortia support staff in regular meetings and Consortia Interest Group meetings.
A direct hire can be funded with a fee managed separately from the ORCID membership fee (see cost recovery models). Consortia that do not have the internal structure or capacity to hire support staff may consider reallocating one of their current staff members or engaging an appropriate organization (one involved in research infrastructure and/or community building) to provide support.
ORCID will support your efforts with training and other interactions
Regardless of how a consortium provides community support to members, ORCID will oversee the quality of that support through a training program and regular ongoing interactions, as described. The Consortium Lead Organization is responsible for monitoring and reporting on helpdesk volume and response rate, member satisfaction, outreach events, and in-progress integrations. We will independently monitor tickets from members that come directly to ORCID and provide central coordination for consortium support staff, to foster communication and sharing of effective practices. We will also publicly recognize excellent consortium support.
Determine cost recovery model
Some consortia receive funding from government sources for the support role, while others distribute the cost among their members. Various cost-recovery models are in use, including tiered fees and flat fees. In all cases, the membership fee remitted to ORCID is the same, and any additional fees are purely local in nature and not passed through ORCID.
Ready to start the conversation with us?
If, after you’ve reviewed this document, Roles and Responsibilities of ORCID Consortia, and the Onboarding Checklist, you’re ready to start a conversation with us to explore the possibility of forming an ORCID Consortium, we encourage you to reach out to us at [email protected]