Outreach and engagement with our community is an important part of what we do at ORCID and, thanks to support from the Helmsley Trust and other sponsors we are delighted to be able to continue our program of regional workshops in 2016. These events typically feature sessions by ORCID regional staff and invited speakers. They are free of charge for attendees and are intended for anyone interested in learning about ORCID, particularly those responsible for research information management at universities, research institutions, publishers, libraries, and funding organizations, as well as researchers themselves.
In 2015, over 500 people attended ORCID-hosted workshops in Spain, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Mexico, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Taiwan. This year we are planning workshops for the first time in Singapore, Canada, France, Chile, Ethiopia, Ghana, Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Korea, and Cuba, and we will be returning to UAE, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa. More details and registration information will be available on our events page as our plans firm up; in the meantime, here’s a taste of what we’re up to in the first few months of 2016.
Our first workshop of the year was held at the American University of Sharjah, UAE, on 6 March 2016 (sponsored by the university and KnowledgeE). The workshop attracted both administrators and researchers from various academic institutions and funders. Researchers took the opportunity to register for their ORCID identifier and institutions explored options for ORCID integration and membership. In the Middle East, researchers publish in multiple languages and ORCID is seen as a solution to both the challenges of transliterated author name variants and in making Arabic-language literature and research available across systems.
Next up is our first ORCID workshop in Singapore on 6 April 2016, organized jointly with the Singapore Management University and sponsored by SMU Libraries, Elsevier, and Thomson Reuters. The program includes talks by Pin Pin Yeo, (SMU), Natasha Simons (Australian National Data Service), Christopher Chan (Hong Kong Baptist University Library), Kosuke Tanabe (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan), See Diu Seng (Thomson Reuters), and Alexander van Servellen (Elsevier). A limited number of spaces are still available so please register now if you’d like attend.
Later next month, on April 26, we will be visiting the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in Spain, for a workshop including speakers Marta Soler Gallart (University of Barcelona), Cristina González (FECYT), Joan Cabré (University Rovira i Virgili), and Victoriano Colondrón (Copyright Clearance Center). The workshop is sponsored by UCM and Copyright Clearance Center, and all sessions will be conducted in Spanish; registration is now open. We’ll also be traveling to Portugal for presentations at Universidade do Porto and Universidade de Coimbra.
And in May, we are holding our first workshop in Canada – at the Chestnut Conference Center, University of Toronto (UT) on May 17. Sponsored by UT, Digital Science, Elsevier, and Thomson Reuters, the theme of the meeting is ORCID in the Research Lifecycle, and the program is close to final. Since the workshop coincides with our next Board meeting, we are delighted that several ORCID Board members will be speaking, including Ed Pentz (Crossref), Daniel Forsman (Chalmers University of Technology), Veronique Kiermer (PLOS), and Patricia Brennan (Thomson Reuters). Registration is now open and space is limited so make sure you reserve your place now. We are also working with Carleton University to plan a meeting in Ottawa on 20 April. More details will be forthcoming.
We are hugely grateful to the generous support of our sponsors, hosts, and speakers for making these workshops possible. We hope that many of you will come along to find out more about ORCID, tell us about your experiences, ask us your questions, and help us serve you better. Check our events page throughout the year for slide decks and information on new workshops. And feel free to contact us with ideas for workshop topics and locations. We look forward to seeing you!