ORCID welcomes this guest post by Eva Hnátková, Open Science Coordinator at National Library of Technology in Prague (NTK) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3237-9305 and Barbora Votavová, ORCID Coordinator at the National Library of Technology in Prague (NTK) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6445-2183.
We are delighted to share that research and higher education institutions in the Czech Republic, led by the National Library of Technology in Prague (NTK), are gaining momentum in the establishment of a Czech ORCID consortium.
After years of steady growth in uptake of ORCID in the Czech Republic, research and higher education institutions are looking to improve the quality and openness of research information. The National Library of Technology in Prague (NTK) can offer a coordinated national approach and central support for integration and adoption of ORCID in the Czech Republic. In late September 2021, NTK and ORCID took the latest step toward the establishment of a formal community of practice by co-hosting a virtual workshop “ORCID in the Czech Republic: towards National Consortium.” Presenting at the workshop was Eva Hnátková, Open Science Coordinator at NTK; Britta Dreyer, Head of PID and Metadata Services at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB); Jan Dvořák, the Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship at Charles University; Barbora Votavová, Coordinator of ORCID at NTK; and Gabriela Mejias, Engagement Manager of the Global Consortia Team at ORCID.
The benefits of widespread ORCID adoption
ORCID currently has 24 consortia, a group of five or more non-profit organizations that join to implement a coordinated approach towards ORCID adoption in their countries. Communities of practice are a catalyst for national adoption by working to achieve their own implementation, outreach, and policy goals while sharing best practices and resources so all can more easily reduce administrative burden for everyone and better understand the impact of the research they facilitate or fund. This is especially important considering how diverse many of the systems are that make up scholarly infrastructure, and how challenging that makes support for interconnectivity.
Britta Dreyer, from TIB, the lead organization for ORCID’s 74-member German consortium, presented insights during the workshop, noting that ORCID-supported systems and the sharing of information among institutions goes a long way in reducing that pain in the ORCID DE consortium. She outlined other key benefits of ORCID for research institutions:
- Accurate attribution ensures researchers get the recognition they deserve and improves visibility of institutional research outputs;
- Reduction of administrative burden, reducing the need to re-enter the same data into multiple systems saves time and money;
- Persistent connection of affiliated researchers regardless of whether they are still at the institution or have moved on;
- Interconnected infrastructure to extend the reach of institutional systems when profile data is pushed into ORCID records.
Improved metadata makes interconnectivity/reuse easier—communities of practice, such as we are moving toward in the Czech Republic, enables easier integrations via shared resources and information. This has a net outcome of helping to improve administrative efficiency and insight into research impact throughout the entire research ecosystem.
In addition to name disambiguation and ensuring proper credit for research outputs, researchers from institutions that have adopted ORCID and have integrated with the registry enjoy being able to access and share their unique profile data wherever they need to, with reduced time and effort.
ORCID in the Czech republic
Institutional adoption of ORCID began in 2015 when the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) was onboarded as its first member in the country, and it wasn’t long before CTU completed their integration with ORCID’s Member API, a custom solution that helps connect ORCID and Dspace. ORCID currently has seven institutional members in the Czech Republic who have among them completed six integrations with the Member API.
| Member since | Member organization | Integration status | Description |
| 2015 | Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) | Complete | This integration collects authenticated ORCID iDs and disseminates these into multiple systems, including their Dspace repository. |
| 2016 | Tomas Bata University in Zlín (TBU) | Complete | This integration collects authenticated ORCID iDs and connects works data into researchers records from their institutional repository. |
| 2017 | Technical University of Ostrava (VŠB) | Complete | This integration collects authenticated iDs and connects employment data into their researchers’ ORCID records. |
| 2018 | Prague University of Economics and business (VŠE) | Complete | Publications Repository is the internal system of the University of Economics, Prague. This integration collects authenticated iDs and connects affiliation data to ORCID records. |
| 2020 | Brno University of Technology (BUT) | Complete | This integration collects authenticated iDs and connects affiliation and works. |
| 2020 | Mendel University in Brno (MENDELU) | Complete | This integration collects authenticated iDs and connects affiliations and works data into researchers’ records. |
| 2020 | University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague (UCT Prague) | Under development |
To illustrate researchers’ use of ORCID, as of September 1st, 2021 there are 47,505 iDs associated with a .cz email address. However, as this number does not include iDs registered with other domains (e.g., gmail or other publicly available emails) the number of ORCID users in the country is likely to be higher.
In 2017, thanks to local volunteer translators, ORCID added Czech translations to the Registry and outreach resources, and in the same year, ORCID organized a workshop in Prague to raise awareness of ORCID and the importance of PIDs by showcasing institutional integrations and national approaches and use cases towards ORCID adoption.
In April 2019, the Czech Government approved the Action plan for National Strategy of Open Access to Scientific Information for 2017-2020. One of its measures was to introduce unique identifiers for authors (ORCID iDs) as a mandatory part of the Research, Development, and Innovation (R&D&I) Information System (the Czech National CRIS – IS VaVaI 2.0). This national R&D&I Information System collects information on R&D&I supported from the public budget in the Czech Republic and is the only authorized, complete, and binding source of this information.
Later in October 2020, the Czech Research, Development, and Innovation Council (R&D&I Council), which administers and operates the R&D&I Information System, released a call for research organizations to introduce ORCID and request iDs to be connected to publications reported on the national CRIS, to improve research evaluation and bibliometric analysis.
It is estimated that in the year since the call was published, nearly half of Czech researchers were reported to have an ORCID iD (48.2%), up from a third (32.7%) over the four previous years.
NTK takes the lead in driving ORCID Czech consortium discussions
Although the conversation between ORCID and Czech stakeholders around national adoption started back in 2017, last year saw a turning point when NTK took the lead in driving these discussions. NTK, managed under the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports (MEYS), is the largest and oldest library of technical literature in the country. It is part of the national information infrastructure for R&D&I and is dedicated to provide professional information resources and services for students, academic staff, researchers, and other seekers of technical information from the general public.
In November 2020, the Czech Government approved funding for NTK to lead a seven-year project called ”National Centre for Information Support of R&D&I” to increase the quality and efficiency of the national R&D&I environment and to reduce administrative burden on the staff of research organizations by:
- Establishing and leading a national ORCID consortium to support implementation of European standards into the national landscape,
- Creating a new, comprehensive platform, the One-Stop-Shop for Researchers (OSS4R),
- Providing advanced assisted and self-service information and data services
- Building a national repository for documents.
There are plenty of opportunities for ORCID integration throughout the research ecosystem in the Czech Republic: institutional information systems, bibliography databases, repositories, personal evidence systems, multiple information/CRIS systems, grant systems, and the national CRIS. The project is intended to continue the work started by CzechElib, the Czech national consortium that provides Electronic information resources in the country.
Next steps
ORCID is delighted that NTK is taking the lead in this initiative and we hope to see the Czech Republic joining our consortia community. On September 29 NTK and ORCID hosted a virtual workshop to discuss the benefits and next steps to implement a national approach, with more than 70 participants and presentations showcasing European consortia use cases, the German ORCID consortium, and ORCID in the Czech CRIS. If you missed the virtual workshop hosted by NTK and ORCID, we invite you to view the recording here.
