Research Councils’ grants system to capture ORCID iDs from early next year

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03/12/2015

The Research Councils today announce that they have become members of the Jisc UK ORCID Consortium and their grants system will be ready to start capturing ORCID identifiers (ORCID iDs) in early 2016.

This news is the culmination of several years of engagement between the Research Councils and Jisc to understand how they can improve the flow of information across the higher education sector. In a joint Research Councils UK (RCUK) and JISC report published earlier this year, ORCID iD was identified as the leading standard for a researcher identifier.

By becoming a member of ORCID through the Jisc UK ORCID Consortium, the Research Councils have benefited from reduced membership as well as access to enhanced technical resource. The Consortium should accelerate adoption and provide a smoother path to ORCID integration for UK universities. By becoming a member of ORCID universities can integrate the ORCID iDs of their researchers into their own research information system which in the longer term will make the flow of information to RCUK and other funders quick and easy.

The ORCID iD gives researchers a unique digital identity which can be kept throughout their career. This allows them to keep an on-going record of their scholarly activities even if they change research organisation or leave academia. In the short-term, an ORCID iD should ensure correct assignment of research outputs by allowing them to be unambiguously linked to their creators. It also increases the chances that a researcher’s work is discoverable. In the longer term, it should bring about efficiency improvements by saving time and duplication in grant applications and enhanced reporting of research outputs to funders as well as improved analysis of outcomes.

Further information about the benefits of using ORCID are outlined in the RCUK blog. The announcement on the Jisc website can be found here.

BU has also recently joined the Jisc UK ORCID Consortium and RKEO will be looking at integrating ORCID IDs with existing systems early next year.

For information on how to obtain an ORCID ID, please see this link – http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2015/05/18/orcid-have-you-got-one/