ORCID awarded grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support university and professional society integration of persistent identifiers | About ORCID

"ORCID (http://orcid.org) is a non-profit organization that provides an open registry of unique identifiers for researchers. ORCID works with the community to ensure that this identifier is embedded in research workflows and becomes part of the metadata associated with research works and activities. The combination of these two ORCID mission activities—common open identifier and linking—can solve the name ambiguity problem in research and scholarly communications, critical for improving discoverability and interoperability between systems.  For researchers, this means less time searching to find information and less time entering data on forms such as grant applications and post-award reporting.  At the institutional level this means less time and more accuracy in identifying researchers and their works for training and outcomes evaluation reporting. ORCID launched its Registry in October 2012. Since then over 160,000 researchers have registered for an identifier, and several systems including manuscript submissions and grant applications have begun to embed the identifiers.  ORCID announces a new project aimed at encouraging the adoption and integration of persistent researcher identifiers by research universities and scientific and social science professional associations.  Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this project will provide external funding and personalized outreach and technical support to participating organizations. The goal of this program is to catalyze broader community adoption by standardizing and streamlining the ORCID identifier integration process, collecting and documenting use cases, developing open source code samples, and providing case studies of working integrations.  The program will disseminate use cases and integration best practices through an Outreach meeting and CodeFest, to be held in Chicago in May 2014.  Up to 10 grants of $15,000-$20,000 each are available. Proposals are due by August 31, 2013. More information on the program and the RFP are available online, at https://orcid.org/content/rfp-2013-06-orcid-id-adoption-and-integration-program. 'Universities and professional associations understand the value of ORCID, but they want working examples of integrations before committing resources to embedding the identifiers in local systems,' said Rebecca Bryant, ORCID’s Director of Community.  While the Sloan-funded award focuses on organizations based in the United States, it complements an initiative at developing possible ORCID identifier implementation use cases being carried out by JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk/) in the United Kingdom. 'The aim of this initiative, running from now until the end of July, is to demonstrate ways in which UK universities can take advantage of ORCID IDs,' said Vernena Weigert, JISC Programme Manager.  'As part of this work, we will consult with a number of institutions including early adopters to provide an incentive for a wider range of UK universities to start conversations about ORCID implementation and to encourage them to adopt.' More information will be available on the JISC website soon ..."