Script for the presentation ORCID Open research and Contributor IDs at The Open University 2022

1. ORCIDS AT THE OU (2022)
Slide 1. Title Slide.
Slide 2. What we are going to cover
1. What is it?
2. What does it do? What are the benefits?
3. The ORCID Hub
4. ORCID integration at the OU?
Slide 3. What is It?
Slide 4. 16 digit number. OK so very simply an ORCID ID is a 16 digit number which is unique
to an individual. They are persistent identifiers for people who are involved in
academic research – so they could be researchers or contributors, ORCID stands for
Open Researcher or Contributor Identifier. So it’s quite an inclusive thing. Over 11
million ORCIDS have already been created. (Are there really 11 million researchers
and contributors out there?).
So, in much the same way as a book might have an ISBN (International Standard
Book Number) and an academic journal will have an ISSN (International Standard
Serial Number) and an online academic article will (probably) have a DOI (Digital
Object Identifier) a person creating something in the research ecosphere can also
have a persistent identifier – an ORCID ID.
Slide 5 It’s singular and persistent. An ORCID ID is a unique Identifier to you that persists
throughout your academic career. If you research in different areas you should still
only have one ORCID. If you change institutions you should still only have one ORCID
ID – you don’t need to change it. It should stay with you.
You might come across these identifiers referred to as PIDS – Persistent Identifiers –
the p stands for persistent, and that’s what they are supposed to be.
However, there is nothing to stop people getting more than one. Where
organisations mandate the use of ORCIDs we find individuals creating them at point
of need and forgetting they already have one. So it does happen that people have
more than one ORCID ID – this can be a problem.
Slide 6 It’s free at point of registration – which is maybe why we have people getting
more than one. It costs nothing to an individual to register for an ORCID. Of, course
it’s not cost free. It is (at least in part) funded by the community – it’s not a
commercial enterprise. The OU for instance pays an annual fee to support ORCIDs
and this allows our systems to interact with the data in a particular way. Moreover,
ORCID have pledged to keep it a community owned service. They have promised
not to sell to a commercial entity.
Slide 7. It can be private – and at the very least control of your ORCID ID rests with the
individual. No one else has an authority to use or do things with an ORCID ID. It’s up
to the owner to use it, and if they see fit, delegate permissions to trusted third
parties. The ORCID organisation is very hot on this, and the ethos is reflected in the
design of the service.

2. So, whilst connecting your ORCID to multiple services and allowing data to pass via it
would appear to me like a good thing it’s up to individual ORCID owners to do this.
Slide 8 It’s Open – OK so this is obvious in the name but it’s also why it’s become so
ubiquitous. The fact that it’s open means different platforms have been able to use
it. So, we see it in University systems, funder systems and commercial publishers’
systems. Organisations wanting to use this data can because it isn’t proprietary, and
because of this it’s become the de facto researcher identifier.
PAUSE QUESTIONS
Slide 9 What does it do? What are the benefits?
Slide 10. Disambiguation / Self identification for the researcher
This central function of an ORCID ID is disambiguation and it works for at least 2
parties. Firstly, it works for the individual researcher and secondly it works for
professionals working in scholarly communications (be they publishers, librarians,
research admin staff). And I’ll call this same function self identification (for the
researcher) and disambiguation (for the admin / professionals)
Slide 11. Author names can be similar or the same. In any system of many papers if you have
a relatively common name you may need to identify what is yours, and what is not
yours. Otherwise, you may be attributed to papers you didn’t author or you may not
be attributed to papers you did author.
Recently we had an example of a PGR who shared a name with a researcher in the
US. So, recently we had an example of a PGR who shared a name with a researcher
in the US. Google Scholar has automatically associated some publications authored
by the OU PGR to the US author not the OU author. So we had to contact the US
author and ask them to disassociate those publications from their profile to enable
the OU author to add them to their profile.
When you are reliant on just names to identify who is the actual author on a paper,
this can happen. However, if you have a unique identifier behind that name these
problems shouldn’t occur.
Slide 12. John Smith - Google Scholar – this is a separate example of how a system reliant on
names can mis assign publications to an author. There is a lesson here in curating
your external profiles, especially if you have a common name.
Slide 13 ORCIDs may be particularly useful in some countries and regions.
 The problem of shared names is greater in some of these countries.
 In some countries people have single names, this poses pose particular
problems – using ORCIDs in the first instance might help this.
 Transliteration of names from original languages to English can cause
different names to be merged.
 Research will be published in native languages, other research by the same
author in English. These names will need to be represented together.

3. Slide 14 Disambiguation / Self identification for the publisher / librarian. OK so all of these
things are useful to individual researchers. But it’s also beneficial to those of us that
work in scholarly communications.
Slide 15. Academia.edu. If you have an academia.edu or research gate account you will be
forever receiving emails about “Are you the Chris Biggs who authored a popular
paper in …” It’s the same disambiguation thing going on - systems are trying to get
you to assert authorship or non-authorship of a paper for 2 reasons. Firstly, so that
you can have a clean profile of publications and secondly services like academia,
scopus, web of science etc will have better, cleaner databases with which to take to
market.
This may explain why ORCIDs have gained so much traction – their benefit is as
much for librarians and publishers than it is for researchers. And for commercial
aggregators that may have actual monetary advantage.
Slide 16. ORO. Disambiguation is a key challenge for a librarian like me who administers a
database of names. Creating accurate publication affiliations via ORCID means the
quality of the dataset is better.
Johnson in ORO. This is 3 different people and we are able to disambiguate them
because we can identify middle initials and subject content of the papers they are
writing about. This disambiguation is maintained by the use of OUCUs/Staff numbers
as identifiers to assert authorship of papers. But this is a time consuming people
intensive task, prone to error.
Slide 17. Burel in ORO. This is the same person… they have 2 OUCUs – one when they were a
student the other as a member of staff. Identifiers should be unique and singular.
So, you can see the uses of a disambiguation tool like ORCID for a librarian are quite
real. Publishers and research admin staff have the same issues with the data they
curate and the services they build with this data.
Slide 18. Connecting. The second key benefit is the plumbing an open Identifier like ORCID
can provide to scholarly communications.
Slide 19 ORCID IDs allow for the transfer of data across systems via APIs as it is a common ID
across them. So the ORCID mantra is “Add data once and re-use it.” The aim is to
stop keying in the same data in multiple systems.
The benefit of ORCID is that you, in theory, add data about awards, affiliation,
education, publications and research data once and use ORCID ID to push this data
around to multiple connected systems.
Slide 20. There are some advances here…. But we aren’t there yet
Slide 21. Compliance. Do it or you won’t get published, at least not in this journal. Over 100
publishers have mandated ORCIDs and funders too are recommending it’s usage in
bids. UK Universities reports on ORCID take up in REF exercises and HESA (Higher
Educations Statistics Authority) returns. Like I say ORCIDs make administrators life
easier too
Slide 22. Authentication.

4. Slide 23. ORCID IDs can also be used as an authentication protocol. Instead of having multiple
logins – ORCID could be a single sign on. This appears to have been enabled in some
publisher manuscript systems – so you may see ORCIDs being used as an alternative
login option for some manuscript submission systems.
PAUSE Questions
Slide 24. ORCID Hub – Share screen. DEMO.
Slide 25. As well as a piece of metadata, ORCID has a web presence – this is the place you can
sign up for an ORCID and it should provide all the support you should need in
creating your ORCID connections.
It’s also the website that renders all the data associated to an ORCID ID publicly
available – should the owner choose to make it publicly available.
You can see education, employment, funding, works, peer review. And you can
populate these sections by connecting to those other systems I’ve been talking
about. Some of these systems will auto update, so whenever a new publication is
recorded it will update in your ORCID record.
See Search and Link on ORCID website.
If you cannot identify known items from linked systems you can add them manually
or, if they are publications, by import from DOI or BibTex file.
Slide 22. So it can look a bit like a CV, however you could choose to have an ORCID use it in all
the ways we’ve mentioned but then choose to make all the information private. It
may be you do not want to have to maintain another page, or there is some
confidential information. ORCID was not intended to be a CV however it is a (useful
for some people) by product of the Identifier.
Slide 26. ORCID and OU Systems integration
Slide 27. ORO Integration. The ORO Integration allows you to connect your ORCID to ORO.
This means your ORCID will display in ORO, you can push existing publications from
ORO to ORCID (we hope to update this to a 2 way connection this year) and your
affiliation will also be verified in ORCID.
Slide 28. ORDO Integration.