As a community-led organization, listening to what you have to say about our services is critically important to ORCID, to ensure that we understand and meet your needs. So, over the past few years we have been surveying our community, and using your feedback to help us better serve you. This has included a survey of our consortia lead organizations, two community surveys (with a third under way!), and — late last year — our first member survey.
Carried out between September and November 2018, there were 170 responses, of which 126 (74%) were complete. The organization types that responded largely reflected our overall membership, with the vast majority (78%) from research institutions, which comprise 79% of our membership. Geographically, the responses were less representative, with Western Europe under-represented (25% compared with 56% of members) and the other regions somewhat over-represented.
Some of the learning points we gleaned from the data include:
- Disambiguation of researchers was the top reason given for joining ORCID, and most respondents focus on using ORCID to help researchers. However, user adoption is seen as the biggest challenge to implementing ORCID
- Access to the member API is the most valued membership benefit, but building and reviewing/launching an integration are considered the most challenging aspects of implementing ORCID
- Communications with ORCID are rated highly, with high scores for our technical documentation, but only around one third of respondents are using our freely available outreach resources
- Members are largely positive about ORCID, shown through multiple modalities: a NetPromoter score of 38, high scores for questions about interactions with staff, and perceived value of key member benefits.
- We have more work to do to improve our members’ understanding of, and ability to demonstrate, the value of ORCID — to themselves, their organizations, and their researchers
We are already starting to address these needs, including:
- Launching the RIPEN (Research Information Platform ENgagement) program, which will enable simpler ORCID integrations through authenticated ORCID iD collection and secure cross-platform sharing of ORCID permission tokens
- Working to improve the user experience, by ensuring a positive and consistent user experience and user accessibility across ORCID integrations
- Sharing our successes, building on our 2018 Collecting the Evidence initiative to document and share ORCID successes and outcomes with the community, as well as identifying and addressing gaps in our understanding
- Developing additional outreach resources, including: user stories and case studies; videos (available here, with more in progress); an infographic about the value of persistent identifiers for researchers; improvements to the content and navigation of our website (during 2019); and more
Our thanks to everyone who participated in the survey — we really value your feedback! If you have other suggestions for how we can better serve our members, please contact us.
