Consortia are integral to the success of ORCID, not just because they account for 77 percent of our membership, but also because they bring universities and organizations together in powerful communities of practice across 33 countries around the world.
Our operational model requires—and indeed the success of consortia depends upon—consortia lead organizations taking on the roles of local administration, as well as technical and outreach support to enable us to scale globally. The role that consortia lead organizations take in building and managing their national or regional communities of practice is a key driver in ORCID’s successful uptake across the global research infrastructure.
ORCID’s membership agreements set the parameters of a successful partnership by outlining bi-lateral expectations—both what the member organization can expect from ORCID and vice versa. But the communities of practice that are formed afterward are key to ensuring ORCID member organizations reduce their administrative burden through ORCID, which is often best achieved through ORCID consortium membership.
Throughout the year, we also share and discuss ORCID and consortia-driven strategies, opportunities, challenges, and ideas with our consortia lead organizations in our Consortia Interest Group meetings and forum.
In-person workshops, like the one in Santiago, Chile, on 9-10 September—our first consortia workshop in Latin America—help us continue the information sharing, ideas exchange, and building on past work to grow community in the region.
In Santiago, Chilean consortium lead organization, CINCEL, hosted consortia leads from Chile, Brazil, Columbia, US, Denmark, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa at the DataObservatory. ORCID Board member participants from the USA, Australia, France, South Africa, and Canada also joined the workshop during the ORCID Board meeting.
Reflecting on progress and future directions
To kick things off, consortia leads, ORCID staff, and a number of ORCID Board members, reflected on our growth compared to 2019. We now have 28 ORCID consortia, including one regional consortium, compared to 17 in 2019.
The group also reassessed the Roles and Responsibilities of Consortia and followed the analysis from a double session on consortium performance, challenges, directions, of each consortium’s future through group activities. A common theme that emerged was the importance of the consortia lead organization that understands the local research landscape to ORCID’s global reach.
Another big topic was ORCID’s revamped consortium member fee model, launched in 2022. This new model reflects organization size and funding. Next year, all organizations will be invoiced according to their operating budget worldwide.
Additionally, since ORCID is a conduit between the many systems that manage research, we analyzed our integration review protocol as part of the research infrastructure. We found that most individual researchers connect their ORCID ID at grant agencies when initially applying for research funding, and/or a manuscript submission system for publishers, then with a CRIS/RIM system for their research institutions to track their scholars’ output and repositories for preserving researcher output. Enabling the common systems in this cycle to easily connect to ORCID eases the burden, both for member institutions and for researchers themselves.
Last but not least, we had a constructive exchange between consortia leads and Board members, where we discussed the challenges of keeping representative participation and meeting locations in a large world.
Five years of fruitful exchanges with our Consortia
Five years ago, at the ORCID Consortium workshop co-hosted by Lyrasis in Atlanta, we held a session called “Where will we be in 2025?” Since then, France, Ireland, Japan, US Federal Government Agencies, Ireland, Colombia, Chile, Ukraine, Latvia, Czechia, and Lebanon have all established ORCID consortia.
ORCID has provided new services to consortium member organizations that were not available in 2019, including the Member Portal, visual member reports, and the Affiliation Manager. In a short time, the ORCID consortia community has grown and, in many cases, achieved self-sufficiency.
It is worth highlighting the role of Consortia, which established a consortium in 2021 in Colombia, has emerged as the third largest consortium by member numbers. They are also a trailblazer by establishing the first multinational regional consortium, ORCID-LAC. Their excellent consortium leadership to members in Colombia, México, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru is one that showcases how the consortium lead model works best.
Looking ahead
In-person events are invaluable and would not be possible without the hard work and effort of organizations like CINCEL, which produced a great summary of hosting the ORCID Board meetings and the Consortium Workshop in video and news format.
After we conducted workshop exercises about how a small non-profit organization can scale with the help of global consortium lead organizations, the consortium leads put forth possible action items.
In the following bi-monthly Consortium Interest Group meeting, workshop attendees and ORCID staff organizers Paloma Marín-Arraiza, Fran Alsina, Ana Cardoso and Brian Minihan worked with consortium lead organizations who were not able to participate in person to undergo similar processes.
We look forward to meeting in person again in February 2025, with appreciation to the Ludwig Maximilian Universität München for hosting!
If your organization is thinking about becoming a consortia lead, we encourage you to start with ORCID for Consortia: Roles & Responsibilities.