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Foundational Observations: Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, 2017-2020/ORCID Update: Integrating ORCID iDs into Research Funding Workflows

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This observation was written by Caroline Winter (with thanks to Lisa Goddard for her feedback and contributions), for the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments partnership.

As an open, non-proprietary, international, and discipline non-specific tool for identifying researchers, the ORCID is an important component of digital research infrastructure. For more information about ORCIDs, see the observation ORCID: Connecting Research and Researchers.

In September 2019, ORCID’s Funder Working Group—an international group of research funding organizations, including Canada’s Tri-Council Agencies (CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC) and the Australian Research Council—released three reports offering recommendations for researchers, institutions, and ORCID about integrating ORCID into funding workflows.

  • ORCID and Grant DOIs: Engaging the Community to Ensure Openness and Transparency of Funding Information recommends the use of ORCIDs for researchers, DOIs for individual grants, and Crossref or another similar tool for automatically updating ORCID records with funding information in order to reduce administrative burdens.
  • The ORBIT: Grant Application Data Field Survey Report presents findings from a survey of data fields used in grant applications compared with the fields used in ORCID records. It emphasizes the need for ORCID, as an open platform, to consider users’ privacy when integrating with applications that, for example, ask for applicants’ gender and citizenship status.
  • The ORBIT Funder Reporting Survey Report focuses on how ORCID records could integrate with grant reporting workflows. It finds that using ORCIDs to automate parts of the reporting process would improve the reliability of the data and free up resources for analyzing qualitative information.

ORCIDs and the INKE Community

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Several INKE Partnership members are involved in ORCID initiatives. The Australian ORCID Consortium has 41 institutional members, including Edith Cowan University and Western Sydney University, both part of the INKE and CAPOS communities. The Consortium promotes and supports ORCID engagement within the Australian research community. ORCID-CA, the ORCID consortium in Canada, has 35 institutional members and a working group of institutions and other stakeholders, including several INKE partners: CARL–ABRC, CRKN–RCDR, Compute Canada, and PKP. Lisa Goddard (U Victoria Libraries), the current Chair of the ORCID-CA Advisory Committee, notes that this committee “brings together funding agencies, infrastructure providers, research institutions, and publishers to support and encourage the adoption of ORCID as the definitive research identifier in Canada.”

ORCID Integration in the Broader Academic Community

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Funding organizations are becoming increasingly engaged with ORCID. Currently, 34 international funders are ORCID members, including the Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, and 11 funding organizations have signed an open letter as a public commitment to implementing ORCIDs. In Canada, some have suggested integrating ORCIDs the Canadian Common CV, as reported in University Affairs in 2017 and 2019. As Goddard notes, streamlining the sharing of information between researchers, publishers, institutions, and granting agencies—and alleviating the administrative burden on researchers—is one of ORCID’s primary goals.

Integration with publishing workflows is increasing as well. To date, 80 publishers across the world and in various disciplines—including PLOS, Wiley, Wellcome Open Research, Springer Nature, and SAGE—require authors to provide ORCIDs, and many others strongly encourage it. The response to this requirement from authors has been overwhelmingly positive (Meadows and Haak 2017).

ORCID Integration and Open Scholarship

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Openness is one of ORCID’s core values, and ORCIDs are important within the open scholarship ecosystem as a means of making researchers and their work FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Reusable, and Interoperable (Brodeur 2018). The ORBIT project aims to “optimize an open infrastructure that supports open research” by making research information more transparent, more accurate, and more interoperable. That said, Goddard emphasizes that researchers control their profile information, including what information is included and how it is shared, as well as how open their profile is.

Because they recognize that the research ecosystem includes more than just published outputs commonly identified by DOIs—ORCIDs are important for research evaluation beyond conventional citation metrics (Haak et al. 2018). Being open and interoperable, ORCIDs are important for tracking and reporting open scholarship through integration with altmetrics, for example, and by enabling funders to efficiently track compliance with their OA policies (Brown et al 2019; see the Observation Compliance with Open Access Policy in Canada).

Works Cited

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