Last spring, a broad group of UK higher education sector bodies, funders and professional associations signed a joint statement expressing their support for the ORCID initiative.
The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), a signatory on the joint statement, recently announced that it is including ORCID identifiers as a field in their Student Record. “The next step is to gather all the necessary details to make up our operational documentation pages, to give institutions details about what data to return and how to return it to HESA, “ said Rachel Fuidge, Business Development Analyst at HESA.
And this week, Jisc, in collaboration with the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) have announced a pilot project to develop best practices for a potential UK-wide adoption of ORCID in higher education. “This project is an opportunity to develop a community of practice around implementation of ORCID identifiers by HEIs, and will benefit both researchers and their institutions,” said Verena Weigert, Programme Manager at Jisc.
The Jisc/ARMA pilot will provide up to 8 UK higher educational institutions with £10,000 each for their effort in contributing to the body of understanding for integration of ORCID identifiers. Each participating organization will be required to produce an implementation case study, contribute to a final report, and assist in the development of a business case, in addition to blogging about their experiences. ORCID will be providing technical support throughout the project. Jisc are looking to complete the projects by January 2015. Applications are due 21 March, 2014, and the first project meeting will be held 8 May, 2014.
The pilot program will complement and involve ongoing integrations by UK ORCID members Cambridge University, Glasgow University, Oxford University, University College London, and the University of Manchester. It also builds upon the Alfred P. Sloan-funded ORCID Adoption and Integration Program for North American universities and professional associations.
In addition to providing technical support, ORCID will post Jisc project outputs on our Research Organizations Web page and invites all members of the higher education community to join our community forum to discuss integration plans, policies, use cases, and best practices.