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

Topic: ORCID Affiliation Manager push Audience: Technical Leader Forum (management level of technician strand) Use case: Oral presentation on strategic benefits of ORCID Affiliation Manager push (transcript) Reuse under CC-BY Licence. Author: Mareike Wehner [Name, role] Talk about ORCID identifiers and a project the library is leading around ORCID that is relevant for everyone involved in research. ORCID, for those who are not familiar with it, is a not-for-profit organisation that offers persistent identifiers called ORCID IDs for anyone involved in research. If you imagine how books have ISBNs, researchers can have ORCID IDs. They are unique to a person, not a team or project, but one single person. They help attribute research to the right people, even if there are multiple researchers, academics or indeed of course Technicians 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 the people working on the research usually know it 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. Globally, ORCID is recognised by hundreds of organisations and holds millions of profiles, and it applies to all disciplines equally, which is very useful. Now, why am I telling you that: ORCIDs help in three major areas: Everyone involved in a piece of research should get the recognition for it, so by adding it to your profile, there’s documentation of it and it makes your involvement more visible. ORCID acts as a data source for many other systems and, because they are self-administered, can help those other systems be up-to-date. This becomes amongst other things important when we look at the Strategy 2031 because ORCID can theoretically even improve rankings by providing rich metadata to those other systems. Lastly, 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. So overall, ORCID IDs are useful to have, and the library wants to make maintaining them a little bit easier, so we initiated the ORCID Affiliation Project. You might have seen on digital screens around campus that we encourage anyone involved in research to sign up for an ORCID ID. What we also do is send out an invitation that will ask account holders to let the University of XXX verify your affiliation. The ORCID Affiliation Project has the goal of adding rich metadata about the University of XXX to the ORCID profiles. This helps other systems have the best metadata possible, and also help tidy things. For example, sometimes research outputs or activities are not attributed to any institution or misattributed to another if maybe someone has switched to XXX but forgot to update their profile, so this output or activity is kind of getting lost. We obviously don’t want that, so by allowing the library to add to your profile, this part is taken care of, plus we’re able to even increase the level of metadata by adding persistent identifiers and other metadata about the University of XXX, making it extra visible, so to speak. Practically what will happen is this: On the 25th (hopefully) you will receive an email from ORCID, asking you to log in, or create a profile if you haven’t got one. This is relevant to everyone involved in research, so other groups who receive this invite are Research Staff, Teaching & Research staff and PGR students. On the next screen, you will be asked to grant the University permission to add the verified affiliation to your profile, or deny. If you click on grant access, an item will be added to your profile which includes all this extra metadata about XXX and your current role. This item can’t be edited, because that’s the point of a verified item, but it can be deleted should you choose not to display it, so you’re still able to administer your profile yourself. And that’s it, it’s really straightforward. Once you grant permission, your profile is officially connected with the University of XXX and you get the benefits of Improved visibility of your outputs to ensure you get the recognition they deserve You’re able to share accurate and authoritative information about your affiliation It’s easier to share your research and career data with other systems, reducing administrative burden. And you can gain the benefits of having an ORCID generally, for example it being easy to sign in to other services which use ORCID SSO, to publish or contribute to papers and record research output, etc There’s also another hot tip: If you have a XXX Elements profile, you can now activate a read and write option with ORCID, which means that they can populate each other once connected. Any questions, please let me know, any issues once the invite goes out, please get in touch, I’ve also added a few webpages that might be helpful. Otherwise thanks for your time and please keep an eye out for the invite if it’s relevant to you!