This observation was written by Caroline Winter, with thanks to Lisa Goddard for her feedback and contributions.
At a glance:
| Title | • ORCID and Grant DOIs: Engaging the Community to Ensure Openness and Transparency of Funding Information • ORBIT: Grant Application Data Field Survey Report • ORBIT Funder Reporting Survey Report |
| Creator | ORCID |
| Publication date | September 2019 |
| Keywords | funding agencies, scholarly communication |
As an open, non-proprietary, international, and discipline non-specific tool for identifying researchers, the ORCID iD is an important component of digital research infrastructure. For more information about ORCID iDs, 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 ORCID iDs 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 ORCID iDs to automate parts of the reporting process would improve the reliability of the data and free up resources for analyzing qualitative information.
This diagram summarizes the reports’ recommended workflow:
Source: https://members.orcid.org/cc-funders
ORCID iDs and the INKE Community
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
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 ORCID iDs. In Canada, some have suggested integrating ORCID iDs 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 ORCID iDs, and many others strongly encourage it. The response to this requirement from authors has been overwhelmingly positive (Meadows and Haak 2017).
ORCID iD Integration and Open Scholarship
Openness is one of ORCID’s core values, and ORCID iDs 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—ORCID iDs are important for research evaluation beyond conventional citation metrics (Haak et al. 2018). Being open and interoperable, ORCID iDs 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
The ORBIT Funder Working Group. 2019. ORCID and Grant DOIs: Engaging the Community to Ensure Openness and Transparency of Funding Information. July 2019. https://doi.org/10.23640/07243.9105101.v1.
Brodeur, Jason. 2018. Open Scholarship: Requirements and Resources: Open Access, Open Data, Open Identifiers. McMaster University Libraries. http://hdl.handle.net/11375/22596.
Brown, Josh, Tom Demeranville, Laurel L. Haak, and Alice Meadows. 2019. ORBIT: Grant Application Data Field Survey Report. July 2019. https://orcid.figshare.com/articles/ORBIT_Grant_Application_Data_Field_Survey_Report/9114617.
Brown, Josh, Tom Demeranville, Laurel L. Haak, and Alice Meadows. 2019. ORBIT Funder Reporting Survey Report. July 2019. https://orcid.figshare.com/articles/ORBIT_Funder_Reporting_Survey_Report/9149240.
Haak, Laurel L. Alice Meadows, and Josh Brown. 2018. “Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation.” Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics 3, article 28 (October 2018). https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2018.00028.
Meadows, Alice, and Laurel Haak. 2019. Use of ORCID in the Funding Cycle. Figshare. https://orcid.figshare.com/articles/Use_of_ORCID_in_the_Funding_Cycle/9807869.
Meadows, Alice, and Laurel Haak. 2017. “ORCID Open Letter – One Year On Report. December 14, 2017. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4828312.v1.