The ORCID Taiwan Consortium Lead—National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Library— recently hosted a seminar inviting experts and practitioners from Taiwan to share insights on ORCID implementation, integration into institutional systems, researcher identification, outreach services, and impact.
The goal was to focus on collaboration and community re-engagement within the seminar theme of “Advancing ORCID Adoption in the Research Landscape.” The event was attended by approximately 60 attendees and Academia Sinica—Taiwan’s national academy—and served as a starting point for fostering Taiwan’s ORCID Community of Practice for future growth.
Highlights from ORCID Taiwan’s community conversations
The seminar, which was the first physical ORCID event in Taiwan since 2018, featured a dynamic exchange of insights from publishers, service providers, and ORCID members across borders, including:
- institutional integration of ORCID systems
- researcher identification and outreach strategies
- case studies on boosting ORCID adoption, and
- collaborative models for inter-institutional engagement.
Attendees got a chance to reaffirm their commitments to both adopting ORCID and shaping the future of Taiwan’s Community of Practice through inclusive collaborations among ORCID, the ORCID consortium lead, and research organizations across the island.
Awareness of ORCID still growing
Taiwan was an early adopter of ORCID, forming a consortium in 2017. Since then, its ORCID adoption has remained stable after the initial support from libraries that coalesced as founding consortia members.
While a shared research infrastructure is still under development in Taiwan, each institution has its own platforms (repositories and research information management systems) that help manage and leverage research visibility.
The consortium is now at the point where all of its members have integrated with ORCID in various capacities. While the depth of ORCID adoption still varies, the general awareness of ORCID has grown since its inception and continues on a trajectory of growth.
Libraries lead the way
Each ORCID member in Taiwan has developed an individualized approach to transforming the consortium from a library-led initiative into a campus-wide infrastructure. The library of each consortium member strives to ensure that at least 70% of researchers in each university connect their ORCID iDs into the institutional systems, though the percentage is relatively lower in the humanities.
After nearly ten years since ORCID was first adopted in Taiwan, its university libraries have greatly improved researchers’ understanding of features such as search and link wizards. They’ve also learned about the importance of engaging with researchers through in-person and online events, as well as through social media. For instance, the library works with different departments to co-host training sessions, making ORCID a part of onboarding for early career researchers, and even creating campaigns like printing ORCID iD QR codes on researchers’ business cards.
Additionally, many universities in Taiwan have also adopted ORCID Certified CRIS systems, which make it fast and simple for universities to get the integration up and running, allowing researchers to experience information exchange more effortlessly.
Given the steady condition, the Taiwan ORCID Consortium Lead is ready to explore further ways to grow the consortium and cultivate the community of practices. ORCID’s presence also served to re-introduce how the ORCID Global Consortia community works with ORCID and vice versa, along with case studies from smaller ORCID consortia.
Strategies for growth
The seminar established that collaborations can serve as a vital cornerstone for growing Taiwan’s Community of Practice in years to come. As ORCID adoption has been driven by the library community, cross-functional collaboration, such as between libraries, research offices, and IT teams, will be the next focus to maximize the value of ORCID in reporting, evaluation, and strategic planning.
Each of the Taiwan ORCID Consortium members works hard on their own, but there is still a lot of opportunity to grow collaborations and communications across member organizations to make the consortium interconnected here. Although every Taiwan consortium member is part of ORCID’s Community Trust Network and integrates their systems with ORCID, many have yet to take full advantage of their integration benefits by contributing their data — which would be accompanied by Trust Markers — into ORCID’s Registry. Doing so would ensure their institutional data is shared with systems across the research ecosystem and increase discoverability of their data, reducing administrative burden for both their researchers and themselves.
Some of the strategies for growth turned into commitments that will help build the connections needed to strengthen the research ecosystem in Taiwan. These include:
- Building regular feedback exchanges between ORCID and the Consortium Lead
- Taiwan Consortium Lead to implement outreach and training across member institutions
- Strengthening consortium-level coordination to connect Taiwan Consortium Lead with global practices
With strategies and commitments in place, the true value of ORCID will be realized in Taiwan. As more institutions, systems, and workflows are actively integrated with ORCID and are adding more of their institutional data (and Trust Markers!) the research integrity and global visibility will continue to rise here.
Following Taiwan’s lead
Other libraries in the global research ecosystem can view Taiwan as an example to follow, where impact is not measured by size but instead by collaborations, commitments, and strategies.
This seminar was a starting point for the Taiwan consortium itself to revitalize its community of practice by establishing deeper and more frequent communications both with its own members and with the global ORCID Consortia Community.
We invite members of Taiwan’s research community to join the momentum of the ORCID Taiwan Consortium, and connect with the local research community as well as the global ORCID community.
