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CSP Criteria: Grant/Facility Application Management Systems

ORCID encourages all providers of scholarly service to integrate with our Registry AND to become an official ORCID Certified Service Provider (CSP). Certification is a free service for scholarly service providers to increase the visibility and trustworthiness of services and products.

Benefits of Certification

Grant/Facility Application Management Systems

This document outlines ways in which a typical Grant/Facility Application Management System must integrate with the ORCID API in order to become an ORCID Certified Service Provider, walking through the processes of receiving authenticated ORCID iDs from researchers, retrieving data from ORCID records, adding funding items to ORCID records, updating funding items which the systems has previously added to ORCID records, and crediting reviewers. 

Notes

  • Not every process described will apply to every grant/facility application management system, so not every criteria will need to be met for certification, however systems that do support a given process must meet the criteria in order to be certified. 
  • These criteria are based on extensive analysis conducted on industry best practices for workflows used by various scholarly service provider systems, followed by public review and input from the ORCID community. In order to obtain the best possible value from an ORCID integration it is recommended that all applicable criteria are met, not just the ones that must be met for certification.
  • These criteria apply to the capabilities that are offered by the Service Provider’s platform. It is understood that not all capabilities outlined will be activated by each organization deploying the grant/facility application management system depending on their specific needs.
  • In this document, the terms “must”, “should” and “may” follow the definitions specified in RFC 2119

Certified Grant/Facility Application Management System Providers MUST:

  • Allow sign-in with ORCID iD and authenticate applicants’ ORCID iDs
  • Use data from ORCID records to make registration and application easier
  • Collect authenticated ORCID iDs from collaborators
  • Collect authenticated ORCID iDs from peer reviewers
  • Provide applicants ORCID iDs to reviewers
  • Add funding items to awardees ORCID records and/or add research resource items to awardees ORCID records
  • Include authenticated ORCID iDs in any metadata passed downstream
  • Enable ORCID member organizations to use their own ORCID membership credentials when configuring the system
  • Document how platform users can use the ORCID functionality offered in training and promotional materials

Certified Grant/Facility Application Management System Providers SHOULD:

  • Add service affiliations to panel reviewers ORCID records
  • Add peer review items to reviewer’s’ ORCID records

Overview

Understanding the impact of funding programs is vital to funders strategy, program design, and mission alignment. By embedding ORCID iDs in funding workflows, awardees can be reliably connected to funding programs—as well as saving everyone time and reducing errors caused by manual keying of information. Funding systems play their part in building a trusted research information infrastructure by asserting connections between individuals and the grants that are awarded to them.

Research funders, including professional and scholarly associations, and providers of large shared research facilities can integrate ORCID into existing application and review systems to obtain authenticated ORCID iDs and permission to read from/write to their applicants’ and reviewers’ ORCID records, either immediately, or in the future. 

Funders and facility providers can use data on ORCID records to help pre-populate forms with work and affiliation information and use the record data during the application process. They also add information about grants awarded to ORCID the grantee’s records and provide credit to reviewers by adding review information to their ORCID records. 

Certification Criteria

  1. Allow sign-in with ORCID iD and authenticate grant/facility applicants ORCID iD

Grant/Facility Application Management Systems must obtain authenticated ORCID iDs and the permission to read from/write to their applicants’ and reviewers’ ORCID records. This requires users to sign into ORCID from within the application management system, which then retrieves user data from the ORCID Registry using the ORCID API. It is also essential to provide information about why the funder/funding system is collecting authenticated ORCID iDs and why this is beneficial to their applicants and reviewers.

Using the ORCID iD icon consistently helps ensure that researchers associate it with being asked to securely provide their iD, which in turn builds trust in ORCID as a reliable identifier. This is achieved by providing a hyperlinked ORCID-branded button for obtaining authenticated ORCID iDs on the sign-in and registration pages, and providing an account linking function for users that already exist in your system. Note that an account linking option within a user settings page or similar is not enough on it’s own – ORCID should be made available on par with other means of sign-in and registration to the applicants. 

Authenticated sign-in saves researchers time, reduces password fatigue and provides unique identification of people for funding application management systems independent of their email address.

Further reading: What’s so special about signing in?

  1. Use data from ORCID records to make registration and application easier

Researchers expect the data on their ORCID record to be read and used by other systems, to save them the time and effort and reduce the risk of errors. Grant/Facility Application Management Systems must collect information from ORCID records about applicants’ and reviewers’ names, affiliations, keywords, previous funding, research resources, works, peer reviews and datasets to pre-fill their application and profile forms.

Grant/Facility Application Management Systems may also include their applicants’/reviewers’ publication history in their own database, and may continuously check for updates to keep their profiles up to date.

  1. Collect authenticated ORCID iDs from collaborators

Grant/Facility Application Management Systems must collect authenticated ORCID iDs for all project collaborators, ensuring that they are recognized for their contribution, identified correctly within the system, and within the funding metadata.

When collecting collaborators data from the applicant, application management systems should collect the email addresses. Upon submission, it should contact the collaborators and provide a link that asks them to sign in with their ORCID iD and confirm their participation

  1. Collect authenticated ORCID iDs from peer reviewers

Registration of reviewers should provide the same ORCID support as provided to applicants. This means Grant/Facility Application Management Systems must authenticate  ORCID iDs at sign-in, collect permissions and pre-fill forms in order to save reviewers time. 

More complete profile data makes the reviewer selection process easier and helps to discover possible conflicts of interest. When recruiting new reviewers, editors can assign reviews based on previous contributions and activities sourced from the ORCID registry.

  1. Provide applicants’ ORCID iDs to reviewers

Once a researcher has connected their ORCID iD to a system, it must clearly display their iD within their profile and/or on their application so that it is available to the reviewer based on the review policy. This also helps the researcher know that they have successfully connected and asserted their identity. Format the iD as a hyperlinked URI and include the green iD icon, per our display guidelines.

  1. Add funding and facility awards to awardees’ ORCID records

Grant/Facility Application Management Systems must offer users the option to add validated information about grants and funding awards to researchers’ ORCID records. This makes life easier for awardees and also helps to build trust in scholarly communications, benefiting the funder, the awardees, and the wider scholarly community.

  1. Add research resource items to awardees’ ORCID records

Facilities awarding access to instruments or other ‘funding in kind’ must add validated information about the resources that have been used to support the research to researchers’ ORCID records.  This again helps to build trust in scholarly communications and documents the use of the facility and the support of the sponsoring organization by adding an entry to the research resource section of awardees’ ORCID records.

Sponsoring organizations that do this stand to benefit from improved acknowledgement of resource use and a better understanding of the impact of the work undertaken by researchers using them. Researchers also benefit from the transparent, reliable connections with funders, publishers, and research institutions that will enable them to easily share their resource awards. Resource-hosting organizations can also make the reporting process more straightforward and reliable by embedding identifiers in the application process, and by creating and sharing connections between users and resources. 

  1. Add peer review items to reviewer’s ORCID records

When reviews are obtained, Grant/Facility Application Management Systems should give credit to the reviewer in their ORCID records if this is in line with the awarding organization’s  policy. ORCID supports several types of peer review, including fully open and blind peer review. When adding updates to ORCID records, care should be taken to ensure that information for the correct review type is shared.

By doing this, funders, facility providers and their application management systems can play their part in building a trusted research information infrastructure by asserting the connection between reviewers, their review activity and other contributions, which can then be re-used during future reviewer selection or evaluation.

  1. Include authenticated ORCID iDs in the metadata passed downstream

Authenticated ORCID iDs collected by the Grant/Facility Application Management System should be embedded into any funding metadata exported by the system, enabling them to be used throughout the funding workflow. This means that, for example, when funding data is submitted to a DOI registration agency, the downstream systems can automatically update the ORCID record of the awardee. It also means that the researchers’ ORCID iDs will be searchable in databases that support searching by ORCID iDs, such as Crossref and PubMed.

  1. Enable ORCID member organizations to use their own ORCID membership credentials when configuring the system

ORCID requires that the organization using the ORCID API use their own ORCID API credentials (similar to an organizational username/password). This clearly indicates who is requesting access to update ORCID records, and is required by ORCID’s membership agreement

Multi-tenant and similar systems must provide the ability for ORCID member organizations to manage their own credentials within the system, or have a secure method of transferring credentials to the system. These credentials should then be used when authenticating users, collecting permissions and interacting with the ORCID API.

  1. Document how ORCID members can use the ORCID functionality offered in training and promotional materials

Multi-tenant and similar systems may share a link to the promotional and training materials on their website with ORCID so we can in-turn share with our community and help our members understand the value the system delivers. ORCID must be mentioned in the system’s setup guide or similar documentation, including outlining the benefits of enabling ORCID functionality.

Taking the integration to the next level

Besides collecting researchers’ iDs and connecting them with their grant or facility awards, in order to provide a superior experience for your users, we strongly recommend that Grant/Facility Application Management Systems should also:

  1. Add service affiliations to panel reviewers ORCID records

In addition to funding, research resources and peer review, Grant/Facility Management Systems may also add service activities to ORCID records to recognise review panelists. These recognise ongoing activity, as opposed to one-off reviewing activity that is displayed in the peer review section of an ORCID record.

This can be done using the ORCID API and the same permissions gathered to add works to ORCID records.