ORCID will be launching its affiliation module this fall using ISNI unique organizational identifiers, to support the accurate and persistent identification of researcher institutional affiliations. Andrew MacEwan of the ISNI International Agency said: “This collaboration will be an important step in diffusing ISNIs into the data supply chain to achieve their purpose as a “bridge identifier” that adds value by linking data, systems and organizations, including the scientific communities.” ISNI and Ringgold are currently collaborating to crosswalk Ringgold organizational identifiers with ISNI identifiers. ORCID plans to work through Ringgold to obtain organizational identifiers for public use in the ORCID registry, including the Ringgold Institutional Identifier, the ISNI number, Institution Name, location data, URL and alternative name. Laura Cox, Chief Marketing Officer of Ringgold said: “We are delighted to be working with such an important industry organisation as ORCID. By including institutional identifiers in the ORCID registry, there is a huge benefit to all concerned in scholarly communications. This important development will enable data mapping between different organizations and also the data systems within those organizations.”
The research community has been awaiting the ability to link organizational affiliation with ORCID identifiers. Researchers want to accurately state and maintain up-to-date institutional affiliations; research organizations want to reduce the time-consuming process of maintaining current affiliation records and streamline access to institutional resources for their staff; funders want to more easily track where the research they support is carried out; and publishers want to streamline the manuscript submission process and provide vital information for the automation of Article Publication Charges in open access journals.
Identifying organizations is an ongoing challenge in a number of sectors, in particular in managing organization identity across supply chains. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) conducted a pilot project in 2006, which demonstrated the efficiencies of unambiguous identification of organizational entities, the requirement that all components of the supply chain adopt the same identifier standard, and the issues around metadata collection and data maintenance that needed to be addressed.In 2008, NISO launched an Institutional Identifiers Working Group, which did extensive needs assessment with the publishing, library and repository use sectors. At the same time, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was developing a name standard for public parties in content distribution chains. The two groups combined efforts, and in 2013 recommended adoption of the ISNI standard for institutional identification.
