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.
Research Information Systems
This document outlines ways in which a typical Research Information, Profile or Electronic Research Administration 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 affiliations to ORCID records, adding personal information such as links to their profile on a research organization’s website, and updating information the organization has previously added to ORCID records.
Notes
- Not every process described will apply to every Research Information 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. For example, Current research information systems (CRIS) must add work information to ORCID records, whereas Electronic Research Administration (eRA) systems must add Funding information.
- 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 repository platform depending on their specific needs.
- In this document, the terms “must”, “should” and “may” follow the definitions specified in RFC 2119
Certified Research Information System Providers MUST:
- Collect authenticated researchers’ ORCID iD and permissions
- Display iDs of researchers
- Use data from ORCID records to populate researcher profiles and discover new researcher activity
- Add employment/education information to researchers’ ORCID records
- Add works to researchers’ ORCID records (if applicable)
- Add funding awards to researchers’ ORCID records (if applicable)
- 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 Research Information System Providers SHOULD:
- Add a link to the researchers’ profile in the Research Information System to their ORCID record
Certified Research Information System Providers MAY:
- Add an affiliation to visiting researchers’ ORCID records
- Allow administrators to associate ORCID iDs with authors/contributors
Overview
Research organizations are in a unique position to connect validated, trustworthy information about affiliated researchers to their ORCID records. This enables the research organization to showcase their researchers and their work in the research literature, and allows them to more easily keep track of former staff, students, and faculty past and present. It also makes it simple for researchers to share accurate and authoritative information about their affiliation when applying for grants, publishing an article, book, or database, and more, increasing the trustworthiness of the scholarly record. ORCID integrations also reduce administrative burden for researchers by automating the time-consuming process of maintaining up-to-date records in local faculty profiles or research information systems.
Research organizations integrate ORCID into their research information, profile and electronic research administration systems to collect authenticated ORCID iDs from their researchers and gain permission to read from/write to researchers’ ORCID records, either immediately or in the future. The iDs that are collected can be stored and displayed within the system and shared with other systems in the organization.
Furthermore, systems can add information about researchers, in particular their affiliation, to ORCID records. That information can then be shared, with the researcher’s permission, with the other systems they interact with, helping to create a trustworthy research information infrastructure. ORCID data can be used to populate local systems, to support networking and collaboration, to populate institutional reporting systems, and/or for participating national or regional assessment or compliance programs.
Certification Criteria
To certify as an ORCID Certified Service Provider, Research Information Systems must meet the following criteria:
- Collect authenticated researchers’ ORCID iD and permissions
Research Information Systems must obtain authenticated ORCID iDs and the permission to read from/write to the researcher’s ORCID records. This requires users to sign in to ORCID from within the Research Information System. The system then retrieves user data from the ORCID Registry using the ORCID API. It is also essential to provide information to users about why they are providing authenticated ORCID iDs and why this is beneficial to them.
This is achieved by providing a hyperlinked ORCID-branded button for obtaining authenticated ORCID iDs and permissions.Using the ORCID button 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.
2. Display iDs of researchers
Once a researcher has connected their ORCID iD, Research Information Systems must display their iD on any profile pages within their system so that researchers know that they have successfully connected and asserted their identity. ORCID iDs must be displayed according to our display guidelines.
3. Use data from ORCID records to populate researcher profile and discover new publications
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. Research Information Systems must collect information that they support from ORCID records about researchers’ previous affiliations, keywords, funding, other names, research resources, published works, preprints and peer review too.
Researcher Information Systems should use ORCID notifications to continuously check for updates and keep researcher profiles up to date.
4. Add employment/education to researchers ORCID records
Research Information systems must add validated information about researchers’ affiliation with their organization to their ORCID records. This makes life easier for researchers by connecting and at the same time, helps to build trust in scholarly communications. By asserting the relationship between individuals and their organization — connections that only research organizations can assert authoritatively — organizations can ensure they are appropriately acknowledged as their faculty, staff and students make professional contributions. For the affiliations to be most useful to the wider community, start and end dates are required to keep the affiliation data current. Systems must update employment affiliation end dates with at a minimum the year the researcher leaves an institution.
5. Add works to researchers ORCID records (if applicable)
Many research organizations collect and verify information about researchers’ published work and other research outputs to aid reporting processes in CRIS/RIM systems that manage output reporting. Such systems must allow research organizations to help populate their researchers’ ORCID records with any known research outputs by adding and updating work items. This saves researchers time and ensures that work held in local repositories is widely shared.
Researchers should only have to grant permission once, and the system must automatically keep their ORCID record up to date thereafter.
6. Add funding items to researchers ORCID record (if applicable)
Many research organizations collect and verify information about researchers’ funding information Electronic Research Administration or Faculty Reporting systems to aid reporting processes. If the Research Information System contains this data then the system must add this information to the funding section of researchers ORCID records.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Allow administrators to associate ORCID iDs with authors/contributors
Research information systems may allow qualified administrators (e.g. Librarians) to associate unauthenticated ORCID iDs with research outputs. If they do, then these are checked by the administrator to make sure they exist, and it is made clear that they are unauthenticated when shared with other systems, or displaying them as per our display guidelines.
Taking the integration to the next level
In order to provide a superior experience for your users, we strongly recommend that Research Information Systems should:
- Add a link to the researchers profile to ORCID record
Research Information systems should add a link to any public profile pages to researchers’ ORCID records. This is great news for researchers, as adding links to other websites within their ORCID record helps with search engine indexing, making their work more discoverable. This can be done by updating the website or person identifier fields in ORCID records.
- Add an affiliation to visiting researchers ORCID records
Research Information Systems should allow organizations to acknowledge formal relationships outside of direct faculty, staff or students relationships between researchers and the organization, by adding affiliation relationships, awards, honorary degree, or other distinctions to for visiting researchers ORCID records. This is great news for visiting lecturers, and others, who would like to be able to more easily share information about their work and expertise — and to be more widely recognized for it. And it’s good for organizations too, because it enables them to give researchers credit and to ensure that information about their affiliation is correct and transparent.