ASREN, the Arab States Research and Education Network, is taking the lead in a new regional ORCID consortium as part of its dedication to implementing sustainable infrastructures and enhancing cooperation through open research and research integrity.
The newly launched ORCID-ASREN Consortium represents a crucial step forward for research in the Arab world, aiming to significantly enhance visibility, collaboration, and transparency of scholarly output across the region. While researchers in every country use ORCID, we still have a significant imbalance of participation from member organizations in different regions, creating opportunities for organizations in the Global South to participate with and adopt ORCID at their institutions.
The ORCID-ASREN Consortium is the second of our Regional Consortia program, launched in 2023 to enable adoption of ORCID in regions where there may be insufficient capacity or too few organizations to support a national consortium. The new community of practice is particularly important in this region given the challenges of name ambiguity and spelling variations, especially in the Arabic language and with Arabic names, where a unique ORCID iD is essential to ensure a researcher’s work is correctly acknowledged.
Fostering a culture of open science
ASREN’s dedication to open science is evident in its active contribution to regional policy and infrastructure. In a significant move to advance regional strategy, ASREN partnered with Bibliotheca Alexandrina to host the Foundations of Open Science: Concepts, Principles, and Regional Implementation workshop on 5-6 November, 2025. This major regional event brought together more than 100 specialists and experts, culminating in crucial open science recommendations for the Arab world that ASREN is committed to driving forward. These recommendations include the development of an Arab roadmap for open science, as well as the adoption of open-source systems, the launch of an Arab observatory for open science, and, critically, the reinforced necessity for persistent digital identifiers like the ORCID iD to ensure unified researcher identity across all Arab research platforms and repositories.
Beyond this, ASREN’s involvement in open science in the Arabic-speaking countries includes hosting conferences, supporting national initiatives, and partnering with local institutions like the El Khawarizmi Computing Center (CCK) in Tunisia, National Center for Scientific and Technical Research (CNRST) in Morocco, and Ministries of Higher Education and Scientific Research. Through these events and collaborations, ASREN fosters open science principles in the region, focusing on open access, open data, and research infrastructure development to enhance collaboration and research outcomes.
Tunisia is one of the key countries in ASREN’s activities, which hosted the Open Science – The Way Forward conference in 2022. Additionally, in July 2025, ASREN, TCC Africa, and PLOS co-organised a dialogue in Rabat, which resulted in a commitment to support Morocco’s CNRST in advancing the National Strategy for Open Science and Open Educational Resources.
Also in Tunisia, ASREN works closely with the Centre National Universitaire de Documentation Scientifique et Technique (CNUDST), the national hub for research documentation and visibility. This collaboration supports the integration of ORCID into national and institutional platforms, helping ensure accurate researcher identification and stronger alignment with global open science practices.
To build momentum, the ORCID-ASREN Consortium is actively engaging the community through in-person events and webinars in collaboration with key research and knowledge organizations in the region, such as Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
Such events are vital for raising awareness, building capacity, and advocating for ORCID adoption as a core requirement in research funding and evaluation processes. The consortium aims to have at least 60% of active researchers in member countries registered with ORCID within the first three years. Education will also include promoting integrations with institutional systems to ensure the assertion of validated data and the corresponding Trust Marker, thereby upholding research integrity in the region.
Expanding the community and overcoming challenges
While ORCID adoption in the Arab world is showing promising growth—with more than 150,000 researchers already affiliated with an organization in the region—overall adoption has lagged behind other regions. This new consortium, the second regional ORCID consortium to be established, is specifically designed to address common hurdles— including limited awareness, limited technical infrastructure, and a lack of policy-driven incentives for widespread adoption—by establishing a collaborative framework.
A key part of the consortium’s mission is to integrate ORCID into the existing research management systems, repositories, funding platforms, and knowledge infrastructures of its member institutions, ensuring seamless use and adoption. Institutions from new member countries, such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Palestine, are joining this collaborative framework to promote the use of ORCID iDs among their research communities.
ASREN is dedicated to supporting this community of practice by providing crucial first-line technical and administrative support to members, making the process of joining the global research ecosystem smoother and more sustainable for institutions and researchers alike.
These efforts are crucial for enabling comprehensive access to scientific resources and repositories, thereby enhancing productivity in science and innovation within the wider Arab region.
Visit the ASREN ORCID Consortium webpage today to explore current initiatives, and register for the next collaborative workshop or event, helping to foster open science in the region.
ORCID Consortia share knowledge and pool resources in a cost-effective way
ORCID consortia form communities of practice that share knowledge and pool resources in a cost effective way to help accelerate integration into organizational systems so you can maximize the reach of data into researcher records and across the research ecosystem.
Learn more about how to join an existing ORCID Consortium, or form a new one.
Contributors
Razan Zeyad
Systems Engineer at ASREN, supporting Open Science services and infrastructure.
Raed K. Al-Zoubi
Library Director, Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST)
Nisreen Al Kouz
International cooperation officer for ASREN (Arab States Research and Education Network)
