We have two big milestones coming up in 2017: celebrating ORCID Pi Day (our 3,141,593rd registrant – coming soon!) and the fifth anniversary of the ORCID Registry launch in October. We are also planning to launch our first community awards, for excellence in integrations.
We wouldn’t be here without your support. We are built by and for the community, and we rely on your trust and continued involvement. Trust, transparency, and inclusiveness are at the core of everything we do – all of our guiding principles relate back to one or more of them.
It’s more important than ever to expose how information is connected, involve individuals in managing their information, ensure that we have a reliable infrastructure and transparent governance. For us, that means using persistent identifiers for people, places, and things.
Building trust requires the active participation of everyone involved – the individual innovators and the organizations providing innovation infrastructure. That means using your ORCID iD. Integrating ORCID iDs. Ensuring implementation of best practices: authorization, authentication, and automation.
In solidarity, we will be eating our own dog food. Practicing what we preach. Demonstrating through our actions. Being an exemplar for best practice. ORCID team members will have authenticated affiliations. We will be collecting ORCID iDs from workshop participants and connecting these activities to their ORCID record. We will be embedding ORCID iDs and DOIs in our blog posts, presentations, and white papers. We are participating in a broad community effort on organization identifiers.
Another part of trust is making sure that ORCID services are here for the long term. We have begun work on our five-year strategic plan, and will be engaging you for input and feedback throughout the year. Please join us at our regional workshops, member meetings, and on our regular webinars. Share your ideas!
But that is not all! We will also be working on improvements for users, including making password reset much much easier! (I can hear a collective sigh of relief!)
We have a lively dance card for 2017. In past years we shared our technical development goals; this year we have expanded our public roadmap to include goals across the organization, now available on our public Trello board. Organized around our three guiding pillars – Sustain, Lead, Mature – all members of the ORCID team (that includes you) will be working on these goals.
Sustain
- Financial breakeven: Achieve the point of financial break even – when monthly accrued revenue is equal to the monthly expenses
- Improve support for our Ambassadors and partners: To enhance the effectiveness and cohesiveness of ORCID community outreach programs
- Expand Collect & Connect: Build on the momentum created in 2016 to establish Collect & Connect at the heart of all current and future ORCID integrations; improve support for member integrations; publicly recognize the best of those integrations; and encourage the sharing of best practices and other learning points
- Improve quality of Registry and services: Improve functionality and services that already exist, with each department focusing on ongoing pain points to solve for 2017
- Ensure prudent, community-based decision-making: Track KPIs, re-examine why we are collecting them, and think about the health of ORCID in the context of the health of the larger research ecosystem
Lead
- User/member interface improvements: Improve data management interfaces for Registry and API users, with a specific focus on member self-management and Registry UI improvements
- Eat our own dog food: Implement Collect and Collect processes for ORCID staff and in our interactions with our members and users, such as ORCID meetings, membership contact management, and how we share information externally
- ORCID milestones: Celebrate our milestones! Use ORCID’s own Pi Day and our fifth anniversary to take stock of our progress, look to the future, and engage with our community
- Build momentum across policy bodies and sectoral influencers: Shape conversations in key sectors about PIDs and scholarly communications more generally to ensure that our vision is influencing the widest possible audience
- Explore new user communities: Further develop the diversity in our member communities, and expand the base from which future memberships will be realized
Mature
- Develop and roll out ORCID curriculum and training resources: Transform our approach to outreach and training to be more strategic, proactive, and forward-looking
- Improve consortia onboarding and sharing of effective practices: Strengthen the ability to share ideas and effective strategies within and between consortia
- Improve resilience of ORCID services: Build a resilient organization, using multi-tiered approaches to buffer against the unexpected and ensure longevity of the Registry and associated services
- Lead in developing and implementing trusted researcher-centric infrastructure: : Continued leadership in privacy practices, including developing policies, updating practices, and rolling out staff training and external services
You may track our progress on the Trello board throughout the year, and we will be reporting back regularly via our blog, Twitter, at ORCID events, and more. I welcome your ideas, comments, and support!
