The ORCID DE Monitor is a publicly funded tool that analyzes the use of ORCID iDs in the scientific community. Developed by the ORCID DE research project, the ORCID DE Monitor both measures and contributes to ORCID adoption. Additional information about the history and development of the tool can be found in the project blog (published in German only).
The ORCID DE Monitor was developed as part of the research project, ORCID DE – Consolidation of the ORCID Information Infrastructure in Germany, with the goal to promote the widespread implementation of ORCID at universities and non-university research institutions in Germany. They received their second round of funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2020 to June 2022, and their partners include DataCite, the German National Library, the Helmholtz Open Science Office of the Helmholtz Association, the Bielefeld University Library, and Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library (TIB).
As the project is in its 2nd funding phase (the first was from 2016-2019), it’s critical to be able to measure the program’s success by studying and measuring ORCID adoption in Germany. Project members—especially from Bielefeld University Library—began to collect numbers on the dissemination of ORCID and more detailed information about when, where, how, and in what contexts ORCID is being used early in the project.
Initially, these statistics were compiled manually, but during the first project phase, scripts and visualizations were developed, which formed the basis for an analytical tool to measure project progress.
For the second funding phase, the goal was to develop a website for the visualization of statistics with a public user interface in order to provide a reliable tool for the use and dissemination of ORCID related metadata.This tool—the ORCID DE Monitor—was launched in June 2021 and is available at https://monitor.orcid-de.org (in both German and English). The project focus is on Germany, but for comparative purposes, ORCID-related data from other countries is also considered in order to enable strategically usable findings.
Where the data resides
The ORCID DE Monitor database is largely derived from the scientific search engine, BASE. BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially designed for academic web resources. BASE provides access to more than 270 million publications from various content providers, such as repositories, publishing houses, and DOI registry agencies.
The ORCID DE Monitor also uses figures from the BASE-linked claiming service and from the catalog and claiming service of the German National Library with their Integrated Authority File (GND), as well as figures provided by ORCID itself and the German ORCID Consortium. The corresponding analyses are available for different time periods. Most data were collected and stored from the project start of the first phase in spring 2016.
What the data say
The ORCID DE Monitor currently provides a cartographic representation of the occurrence of ORCID iDs in repositories, in Crossref metadata, and at BASE data providers (such as open access publication services and Crossref members) for different timelines and in a country comparison.
In addition, users can view statistics on the number of publications that are linked to their authors via the BASE and DNB claiming services, the number of GND records containing an ORCID iD, the number of ORCID records in different countries since 2016, and the development of the German ORCID consortium initiated by the ORCID DE Monitor project.
The database, the data flow, and the design of the user interface are described in detail in a recently published concept paper (only in German): http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29552. In addition, the launch of the ORCID DE Monitor was presented at the German 109th Bibliothekartag 2021 (conference of librarians). The presentation slides (in German) are available at https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0290-opus4-176262.
Welcoming feedback for continual improvement
The launch of the ORCID DE Monitor marks a milestone in the ORCID DE project and represents a huge leap forward in the dissemination and adoption of ORCID in Germany. The ORCID DE Monitor already provides broad insight into the world and usage of ORCID, but the project is not yet complete. The tool is still under development, allowing for the potential for future growth and optimization. Therefore, everyone is welcome to send feedback or requests for analysis use cases to the ORCID DE project team [email protected]. Additionally, everyone is free to use ORCID DE Monitor statistics—which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License—for their own analysis, internal or external presentations, and/or other use cases.