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In March 2022, we welcomed our third consortium in Latin America—ORCID-Chile. It was formed with the support of CINCEL (Consorcio para el Acceso a la Información Científica Electrónica, or Consortium for Access to Electronic Scientific Information), which brings together higher education institutions, government agencies, and centers research in Chile. It has 15 member institutions comprising 14 universities and the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID).
ORCID-Chile has seen considerable progress even in the short time it has been in existence: the number of ORCID iDs among its researchers has increased 300%; one of its member organizations, Universidad del Desarrollo, implemented advanced integrations with ORCID, including DSpace 7.4. Another of its member organizations, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, is installing Dspace-CRIS 7.4, and ANID is evaluating the possibility of requiring that researchers share their ORCID iD when applying for funding.
We are pleased to share this interview with María Soledad Bravo-Marchant, the executive secretary of Corporación CINCEL and the technical secretary of the Institutional Support Network of the National Infrastructure for Access to Scientific Information (INA), about the trajectory that the ORCID-Chile Consortium has had in the year after its creation. Bravo-Marchant is in charge of the implementation of the ORCID guidelines and the implementation of the APIs in the institutions in conjunction with the technical committee of the Network.
A community of practice benefits the entire community, from researchers to organizations
The constitution of the ORCID-Chile consortium seeks to extend the use of persistent identifiers in the Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation (CTCI) community, providing a point of articulation of personal and institutional efforts that allows accelerating the curve of adoption and use of ORCID and other persistent identifiers.
The benefits of belonging to an ORCID consortium stem from strength in numbers. 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 its members can maximize the reach of data into researcher records and across the research ecosystem. They are also led by organizations that are experts of the research landscape and national policy in their country or region and are uniquely able to catalyze the adoption of ORCID in their community. In ORCID-Chile’s case, it is aligned with the implementation of the National Infrastructure for Access to Scientific Information (INA) effort led by ANID.
Membership to ORCID via a consortium allows multiple ways to easily integrate organizational systems with the ORCID Registry, which has the downstream effect of propagating your organizational data with the other systems when your researchers connect with them. Integrating with the ORCID Registry can help ensure your organization’s name and data are in the correct format, bringing interoperability between multiple systems across the research ecosystem, reducing burden to the researchers and saving everyone’s time.
In the case of researchers, increasing the national and international visibility of publications and locating possible collaborators and affiliated institutions are just some of the advantages that ORCID provides. In Chile, international collaboration in scientific communication is a historical trend, which implies that national researchers form part of cross-border teams as a way of ensuring relevance and impact of research.
ORCID-Chile’s objective: making Chile visible
At the end of 2021, ANID signed a Memorandum of Understanding with public and private universities, which together with the CINCEL Corporation, committed to establishing a support network for INA, along with disseminating the scope of the Open Access Policy implemented by ANID (more here). The INA project aims to facilitate the daily tasks of research in science, technology, knowledge, and innovation and teaching work, by strengthening the role of university libraries, reducing dependence on the supply of foreign publishers, and launching elements of the Open Access Policy promoted by ANID.
Since 2002, CINCEL has undertaken strategic actions within the framework of collaborative access to scientific information. Today, after 20 years of work, one of those initiatives is to promote the adoption of persistent identifiers such as ORCID. In 2022, a pilot project began to be designed to incorporate an ANID instrument that allocates resources for the acquisition and/or updating of scientific and technological equipment for research activities called ORCID Research Resources in Major Equipment projects. (Its purpose is to associate the scientific productivity of researchers with the equipment used to produce it.)
Recommended links:
CINCEL > Initiatives > ORCID
https://www.cincel.cl/iniciativas/orcid
Interview with María Soledad Bravo-Marchant, Executive Secretary of the Corporación CINCEL
Can you tell us a little about CINCEL and ANID and your role in these institutions?
Bravo-Marchant: CINCEL is a private non-profit corporation created in April 2003. In 2023 it will celebrate 20 years of operation. I started working as the executive secretary in 2004. CINCEL’s main function is to provide information resource acquisition and contracting services to its partners and clients.
Over time, and because the articulation and collaboration between institutions is at the heart of management, this role has expanded to other areas such as the administration of the BEIC program, being the technical secretary of the INA Support Network, and leading the ORCID-Chile Consortium project.
Therefore, I have double duties: I am the executive secretary of CINCEL, and I fulfill the mandates of the Board of Directors and the Assembly of Members, and I am also the manager of the access unit of the Networks, Strategy, and Knowledge Sub-directorate of ANID. It’s a bit of an institutional arrangement to understand, but it has proven its worth over two decades.
Approximately when did CINCEL become involved with ORCID? What were the main reasons why you thought of forming a consortium?
Bravo-Marchant: The ORCID-Chile consortium emerged as an invitation in August 2021 from CABID, which is the Permanent Advisory Commission for Libraries and Documentation of the Council of Rectors (CRUCH) to the CINCEL executive secretary. It was a moment that allowed catalyzing various efforts that, until then, were scattered throughout the national CTCI ecosystem.
On the one hand, ANID was implementing the open access policy and financing open science projects in universities; and CINCEL was supporting these initiatives with the annual execution of the BEIC Program, which provides free access to a relevant corpus of journals for almost a hundred institutions.
Both ANID and CINCEL were working to integrate the universities in a collaborative network in the field of access to scientific information that reduces asymmetries and increases the synergy of the system. The adoption and use of persistent identifiers in the CTCI community implied using international standards on the matter, and we thought it was a very good opportunity to make a scalar leap in integration and interoperability.
What would the consortium member universities have to do to obtain all the benefits of being part of ORCID-Chile?
Bravo-Marchant: It is relevant that institutions understand the importance of developing their integration with ORCID and being able to synchronize and automate their processes. Therefore, our goal for 2023 is to engage all members to review how they can get more out of their membership and analyze the different options they have to integrate with ORCID.
How can universities integrate with ORCID?
If you’re a consortium member
You can use our Affiliation Manager (AM) tool, exclusively for consortium members, to add affiliation data—no integration required! This tool will allow you to add affiliation data to your researchers quickly and without the need for a developer or specialized IT knowledge. That way you can track the impact of your institutions’ research.
Its implementation is very easy, just follow these two steps:
1. Request your production credentials here.
2. Fill this csv document here with the data of your researchers
Once you have done these two steps, upload the csv to the Affiliation Manager as indicated here to send the requests to your researchers.
Whether you’re a consortium member or direct member
You can still benefit from an ORCID integration, probably more easily than you think! You may already have a scholarly service provider (SP) system installed that offers built-in support for ORCID in multiple types of systems, including current research information (CRIS/RIM) and data repository platforms.
Depending on your ORCID membership level—and depending on the functionality provided by each unique vendor—these systems may enable you to collect authenticated ORCID iDs or read data from ORCID records, write data to ORCID records, or synchronize data between your system and ORCID records in ORCID’s Registry. This does not require technical development: Check with your IT Department to see if your institution has one of these systems installed that offers support for ORCID, then request your production credentials here.
There are several Service Providers, such as OJS, DSpace CRIS, DSpace 7.3, ePrints, and others, that have already been certified by ORCID as following our best practices. However, there are plenty of scholarly service providers not in the above list that offer support for ORCID. If you use one of these systems your IT team would need to do a test implementing it in our sandbox testing server so we can give you production credentials.
There are thousands of systems and platforms that have developed an integration with the ORCID API, so we recommend contacting the service provider directly or your consortium leader (CINCEL for ORCID-Chile consortium) to let them know if something has already been developed.
Members with in-house systems
If your systems have been developed independently and internally (in-house), you can still integrate with ORCID, but the integration will require more planning and resources to develop it. Some suggested workflows to be implemented at your institution can be found here. (Our recent blog on custom integrations from our I’m a Member, Now What?! series offers more detail on what is needed to implement a custom integration.)
For your custom integrations, the use of our sandbox testing server is also recommended. You will have support from your consortium leader and ORCID. Once your development in the sandbox has been completed, your consortium leader will review that it meets the minimum requirements to be able to generate production credentials.