Highlights
- Verified institutional email domains can help researchers prove they are associated with an institution in a privacy-preserving manner, without having to share their whole email address
- By adding this capability, we expect to greatly increase the number of Trust Markers associated with researchers’ professional affiliations in the ORCID Registry
- Approximately 2.9 million active records have email domains—from their professional institutions—that have been verified and can therefore serve as a Trust Marker for that affiliation
- So… ORCID has made it possible for researchers to share their verified institutional email domains with others as Trust Markers
- Trust Markers can make things easier for publishers and funders to ensure the researcher they are reviewing is who they say they are
The scholarly community is collectively facing a looming crisis as more false research is slipping into publication, threatening the integrity of the scholarly record. At ORCID, we believe we have an important role to play in helping uphold the integrity of research, since the data in researcher-controlled ORCID records is shared widely and re-used within a growing number of scholarly workflows. ORCID records often contain “Trust Markers”—items in ORCID records that have been validated by one of our member organizations—such as validated affiliations added by universities and research institutions, validated funding awards added by funders, and validated works added by publishers. We discuss more about the concept of Trust Markers in this presentation. In short: The more Trust Markers are present in ORCID records, the more robust the entire scholarly record becomes as that data accumulates in an ORCID record and is shared with more and more systems.
In this blog post, we are delighted to share how we’re enabling researchers to add another kind of Trust Marker to their ORCID records—verified institutional email domains. This allows researchers to demonstrate their association with an institution in a way that also preserves their privacy. ORCID uses the domain information available in the ROR registry to map these email domains to the correct ROR ID for the organization.
Trust markers that were there all along
Thus far, the Trust Markers that are present in the ORCID Registry are there thanks to the efforts of hundreds of ORCID member organizations, who have integrated their internal systems and processes with ORCID. Other than researchers themselves, only ORCID member organizations are able to add data to ORCID records. This is by design: although ORCID is an open registry, meaning anyone can read and reuse data that has been made publicly available, only organizations who have agreed to our membership terms, which commit them to ensuring that data they add is factually accurate, are able to contribute information.
An exception to this rule is a kind of trust marker that has been in ORCID records all along, one that is added by researchers themselves—their institutional email addresses. Since verifying an institutional email requires the user to have authenticated access to their institutional email platform, we know that any users with a verified institutional email address have an association with that institution.
The problem, however, is that less than 5% of ORCID users choose to make the email addresses on their ORCID records public, due to understandable spam and privacy concerns. Thus these latent Trust Markers, which have been there all along, are often not available to people using ORCID data to help evaluate the trustworthiness of the record holder.
Researchers maintain control over the visibility of their data
With this new update, ORCID users are able to separately control the privacy settings of the domain part of their email address—the part after the “@” sign that indicates the organization that administers the email address, from the full address. By making their verified email domains public, ORCID users can signify their verified association with their institution without having to compromise the privacy of their full email address.
Researcher control is a core principle of ORCID, and we offer fine-grained control over the visibility of the information in an ORCID record, and this remains true for email domains.
With this update, when a new or existing record holder verifies a new email address, the domain associated with it will inherit the default visibility setting for the items on their record. Normally this is set to “Everyone”, but the researcher can adjust both the default and the specific visibility settings of each email domain at any time via their account settings.
To respect researchers’ current privacy preferences, existing institutional email domains will inherit the visibility settings of the email addresses they are derived from, which is usually “Only me.” We plan to start prompting record holders to consider updating their settings to share their verified institutional domains later in the year.
Validated email domains that you chose to make visible will show up on your public ORCID profile and in the Record Summary on your public profile, with the green “Trust Marker” checkmark. This helps viewers know that your record belongs to someone who is associated with a research organization, and that they can be more confident about its contents.
If you are an ORCID record holder with an institutional email address that has previously been verified, but the visibility setting is current set to “Only me,” we encourage you to sign in to ORCID and adjust the visibility settings in your ORCID record to allow either “Everyone” or at least “Trusted parties” to see your institutional email domain.
If your ORCID record does not yet contain your institutional email, add it, then verify it!
Remember, if possible, your ORCID record should include at least a personal email address as well as a verified institutional email address:
- Personal email address: for continuity, in case you move institutions, to ensure you always have access to your ORCID record
- Institutional email address: for the Trust Marker
We know that researchers sometimes prefer to use personal email addresses when submitting manuscripts to publishers and applying for grants, so that they can remain contactable even if they leave their current institution. By surfacing institutional email domains in ORCID records, we hope that publishers and funders who collect authenticated ORCID iDs in their submission processes will make use of this information, instead of forcing researchers to use their institutional email addresses as their correspondence addresses, which is increasingly the case today.
Making trusted data in ORCID records more visible is part of our ongoing work
When these changes go live later this week, the first thing users who have updated their visibility settings will notice are new verified domains—complete with the Trust Marker green check—included in the sidebar panel on the left of their ORCID record. We will then be rolling out further enhancements to the feature in coming months. In the shorter term, we will be including verified domains to the expandable Record Summary at the top of each ORCID record and in the Record Summary API. Next, we will be adding provenance information for verified domains, showing the date of verification and “ORCID Email Verification” as the source. As mentioned, we plan to start prompting record holders to consider updating their settings to share their verified institutional domains later in the year. Finally, in 2025, with the next major version of our API, we plan to add verified email domains to our main APIs as part of a larger update.
For the first time, this new capability allows researchers to add Trust Markers to their ORCID records even if their institution does not yet have a direct integration with ORCID (or use our Affiliation Manager tool). By doing so, they will be doing their part to uphold the robustness of the scholarly record, too.
