Publishers – large and small, nonprofit and commercial – play an important role in the research ecosystem and, therefore, in ORCID’s work. Our publisher members provide researchers an opportunity to connect author ORCID iDs to manuscripts, and propagate the iD with the paper as it is published, making it easier for researchers to distinguish their work and to update their personal record of activities.
ORCID now works with close to 40 publishers, including most recently major publisher SAGE. This post focuses on how publishers are currently using ORCID and suggests ways to enhance their ORCID integrations to further benefit researchers and other members of the research community.
When launched, SAGE’s will bring to 39 the number of completed publisher integrations with ORCID, whereby they request ORCID iDs as part of their manuscript submission process (typically for journals only), offering authors the chance to register for an iD if they don’t already have one. This means that researchers are more likely to have heard about ORCID from a publisher than any other source, and to use their iD in a manuscript submission system more than anywhere else.
Some publishers are going further, and we hope that more will follow in their footsteps – contributing to the foundations of a strong and trusted digital research infrastructure that supports the scholarly community.
In particular, we hope that publishers will ensure that the ORCID iDs they collect are published with the author’s manuscript. Not only does this mean the iD will be indexed and discoverable in large publication databases including WorldCat, Web of Science, and Scopus, it also supports auto-update functionality. What is that? An ORCID iD in a published manuscript can be used to signal an update to that author’s ORCID record–and from there update other connected systems. This is a great example of interoperability at work. Researchers have been using search and import tools in the ORCID registry to connect to their existing works. Auto-update will allow authors to enable information on their new publications to flow into their ORCID record. For this to happen, publishers must collect iDs using an authenticated process, authors must use their iD during the submission process, publishers must then include iDs in the published work, and submit the iD, with the other paper information, to CrossRef (who mint the digital object identifier for each journal article). Publishers can either post the publication information directly to the author ORCID record, or CrossRef will ask permission of the author to update their ORCID record.
Other examples of how publishers are helping researchers to distinguish themselves in digital communications:
- Author Submissions: IEEE authors can currently request / enter their ORCID when submitting a paper through ScholarOne and the IEEE Author Gateway. The Institute plans to have the ORCID information also become part of the Xplore (IEEE’s content delivery platform) record and, in the future, to require the use of the ORCID identifier for all authors publishing in IEEE periodicals.
- Peer Review: The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Faculty of 1000 (F1000) are early adopters in our peer review program, which enables organizations to acknowledge peer review activities. Following recommendations made by a community working group set up to determine peer review citation standards, ORCID has launched functionality that is flexible enough to accommodate AGU’s anonymous peer review and F1000’s open approach, in which referee reports are completely open and citable.
- Single Sign-On: Publishers can streamline the manuscript submission process experience by allowing authors to use their ORCID iD as a single sign-on across some or all the journals in their portfolio, as described in this video by Aries Editorial Manager. Around 3,000 journals from over 50 publishers are currently using this service.
- Author Resources: Several publisher members have created online author resources describing ORCID, including Oxford University Press, Springer, and Wiley. Some have developed additional ORCID materials, such as this video for Wiley authors.
As for SAGE, the integration of ORCID into their publishing workflows will better enable global support of their authors’ academic research and databases.
As Executive Publisher, Open Access, David Ross, remarks: “A large part of the publishing workflow is to ensure that our author base is effectively supported both with the dissemination of, and the accessibility of their high quality research. This has been a firm ethos of SAGE’s since our founding 50 years ago. ORCID is a great author resource ensuring linkage across multiple datasets and management of research findings. Collaboration with ORCID enables us to best support our scholarly partners and ensure the high discoverability of key research. We look forward to developing the partnership and helping support the scholarly community further.”
