ORCID Advocacy Toolkit/So you would like to..../seniorleadership

Topic: ORCID Affiliation Manager push Audience: VC / Senior Leadership Use case: Oral presentation on strategic benefits and results of ORCID Affiliation Manager push (transcript) Reuse under CC-BY Licence. Author: Mareike Wehner [Name and role]. I would like to introduce the ORCID Affiliation project in the next few minutes. ORCID, for those who are not familiar with it, is a not-for-profit organisation that offers persistent identifiers called ORCID IDs, or short: ORCIDs, for researchers. If you imagine how books have ISBNs, researchers can have ORCID IDs. They help attribute research to the right person, even if there are multiple academics with the same name out there, or if someone changes their name or spells it in a different alphabet. A major advantage is also that the profiles are fully administered by the account holder unlike other IDs that just get automatically assigned upon publication, like Scopus for example, which helps the autonomy AND correctness of the data that’s being displayed, since researchers usually know their research best. ORCIDs are actually deemed so useful that they are becoming increasingly mandatory with publishers and funders, and there are rumours again that they will be mandatory to submit in the next REF. ORCIDs help in two major areas: They help the institution’s reputation by acting as a data source for many other systems and can even improve rankings by providing rich metadata Because an ORCID profile is pretty much a running CV of outputs and other research activities, having a well-maintained profile can really help put together Narrative CVs and therefore support securing grants. Not only do ORCIDs openly and proudly showcase our University’s research, they also help comply with latest standards and support innovative ways of feeding out metadata. Globally, ORCID is recognised by hundreds organisations and holds millions of profiles, and it applies to all disciplines equally. The ORCID Affiliation Project itself had the goal of adding rich metadata about the affiliation, so the University of XXX, to researchers’ ORCID profiles. I appreciate that time is short, so maintenance tasks can sometimes take a lower priority. This project was introduced to lighten that burden, while also making it on the one hand possible to harvest output data that is already out there, but might not be attributed to any institution or misattributed to another if for example someone has switched to XXX but forgot to update their profile, so practically getting lost in the ether. On the other hand – because ORCID is a data source for other systems – it’s possible to add richer metadata to those systems such as persistent identifiers like ROR and therefore increase XXX’s overall reputation by showcasing data thoroughly and openly. The library is in a unique position that allows to encourage the usage of ORCID across all faculties while offering support to both professional services and researcher. The goal is of course to have as many staff and students involved in research connect with the university in order to grow our reputation as an outstanding institution for research AND open practice even further. The graphic shows how phenomenally successful the first push at the end of last year was: We now have over 5000 unique profiles connected with the University of XXX, almost half of them added in 2023, so considering that the invitation to grant permission went out to just over 7000 staff and students, we’ve been very successful. In the future, technical staff will also be invited since they are of course a crucial part of research in many disciplines. The next step will be to encourage not only the sign up, but also the maintenance of the profiles, since this will be the real time saver in the long run, freeing up time for staff and students to get on with their actual research whilst being able to harvest and pass on rich data about their activities. Overall, engagement with ORCID and active support with it will help the university show its impact and foster collaboration by encouraging open research principles.