ORCID is committed to ensuring integrated systems meet established best practices and technical standards. Since ORCID’s inception, we have always reviewed every integration before allowing access to the production system. This is to:
- Protect end-user privacy by confirming that adequate and accurate disclosures about a system’s use of personal data are made to ORCID users when the system is connected to their account.
- Ensure data quality in the ORCID Registry — for example by making sure that non-authenticated ORCID IDs are not used to add data to records.
- To achieve some degree of consistency in the user experience of connecting systems to ORCID accounts, which in turn builds trust and understanding among users of the ORCID-connected ecosystem.
ORCID offers a Certified Service Provider (CSP) program, which recognizes vendors and platforms that have implemented ORCID integrations in a way that is robust, user-friendly, and aligned with community-driven best practices. ORCID CSPs are required to meet higher integration standards, offering workflow-specific ORCID functionality that goes well beyond the minimum criteria of our standard integration reviews. You can access the list of current CSPs here.
The ORCID team maintains close working relationships with providers of certified systems and reviews CSP integrations yearly to confirm their ongoing compliance with our certification criteria. For this reason, we are confident that the certified systems continue to meet the standards we expect, and thus individual integration reviews per member are not necessary.
The ability to bypass member-specific integration reviews is an exclusive benefit of our CSP program — by agreeing to meet our higher integration standards, vendors are able to offer to their customers a smoother experience when activating ORCID functionality. Because we do not regularly review non-CSP vendor integrations, we are not able to offer this benefit to non-certified vendors.
As an ORCID member, we encourage you to increase awareness of the benefits of the CSP program among your non-certified vendors by:
- Making your vendors aware of the program, which is fully described on our website
- Stressing the value to you of an integration that meets our higher CSP integration criteria. You can find materials that you can share with your vendors here and here
- Requesting that your vendor undergoes ORCID CSP certification, or provides a roadmap with a clear time commitment towards it
- Including the following model contract clause in your RFPs, vendor agreements and renewal discussions:
The vendor confirms to the licensee that [product or service being licensed] has been certified under ORCID’s Certified Service Provider (“CSP”) program for the relevant workflow(s). The vendor further confirms that its certification is current, and that its ORCID integration meets all of the criteria specified by ORCID for CSP certification under the relevant workflows. - Encouraging collaboration between your vendors and ORCID towards certification. If your vendor is already an ORCID Member, they can reach out to their normal ORCID contact. Otherwise, they can contact us at [email protected]