Much of the work that ORCID does to connect research and researchers is a collaboration between us and our member organizations. We provide a Registry of identifiers and a mechanism for systems to interact with the Registry, and our member organizations use these connections to ensure that information flows between their systems and others that individuals have authorized.
Some day…
I spend a lot of time thinking about ORCID’s aspiration – what benefits the Registry could enable. At its best, this interconnected system of computers, workflows, and interactions enables reduced work for researchers and more timely and accurate information for the organizations they interact with. It provides researchers with a personal resource of information about themselves and their activities that has been collaboratively created by them and the organizations that they trust. Through activities like grant applications, publication submissions, and data sharing, researchers can authorize these organizations to automatically keep this personal information resource up-to-date. They can choose who share their information with, requesting that this information be used to pre-fill forms, provide activity reporting that requires less time to curate, and share or supply updates to profile systems. This “enter once, reuse often” world of digital information exchange would be facilitated by system-to-system connections.
… maybe sooner rather than later…
This aspiration may not be that far off. Some publishers will already read your current affiliation from your ORCID record if you want them to. Repositories will add your latest data sets to your ORCID record if you give them permission. And research institutions will add your degree and dissertation information to your ORCID record when you graduate, because you authorized them to do so. Each of these interactions happen because organizations have committed to support ORCID in their workflows and systems.
Even though adding ORCID capabilities to any one workflow or system isn’t very difficult, there would be a significant amount of work needed to get ORCID iDs embedded in every system if each organization had to do this on their own. Fortunately there are some fantastic off-the-shelf tools that are used by many organizations. Many of these third-party systems have already enabled hundreds of other organizations to start making our aspiration a reality today.
… especially with help from third-party providers!
As part of our 2018 roadmap, we are focusing on these third-party system providers, deepening our collaboration with them as partners to help realize ORCID’s aspiration of researcher-controlled, interconnected information exchange. The core objectives of this project are to collaborate with system providers to engage them as partners, develop a core functionality specification for third-party ORCID integrations, and promote these implementations as quick and efficient methods for the community to benefit from ORCID, out of the box.
If you are a third-party system provider, please contact us to become a partner!!
Image: CC0 Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/stick-people-puzzle-helping-2324009/
