JISC ORCID Kick Off Meeting Notes

Yesterday saw the formal beginning of the JISC-ARMA ORCID pilot project with a kick off meeting at the swanky Hatton – etc.venues in Hatton Garden, London. Tempted as I was to splash out on a great big diamond for my lovely wife as I wandered past the expensive jewellery shops, I managed to resist and arrive at the meeting with credit card intact.

The morning comprised introductions from Simon Kerridge from ARMA (https://www.arma.ac.uk/), the JISC Project Manager, Vereena Weigert and Laura Haak, from ORCID. Following this, every participating institution provided a brief overview of there current situation regarding ORCID takeup and plans for the future. It was interesting to note the different methods and approaches to encouraging ORCID uptake, from the very soft to the hard line.

Snippets that caught my attention included

• Portugal has a national CRIS (Current Research Information System). Of particular interest to me as I believe that such systems should be maintained and operated at the national level rather by individual institutions. Along these lines, York University shares an Institutional Repository with Leeds and Sheffield Unis under the 'White Rose' brand.
• Kent University is focussing in particular on early-career researchers and Post Grads. Using research students as ORCID champions!
• Many institutions are looking at different methods to encourage users to engage with ORCID, including mixing pre-registration with manual linking of ORCIDS with existing Intranet records
• HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) now includes ORCIDs in returns.

Swansea University is interested in providing ORCID bilingually to the people of Wales and with this in mind I was lucky enough to catch up with Will Simpson, a developer with ORCID, over lunch. Will explained that it's pretty straightforward to translate the various language files that feed the ORCID website, and they can be found on GitHub, which is great news! Always nice to see organisations embracing open source.

The afternoon saw everybody participating in round table discussions regarding various aspects of the pilot project. I joined a table that included folks who were interested in developing against the feature rich ORCID API (Application Programming Interface). There are loads of different ways of accessing the (public) information in ORCID and they make it easy to consume by providing it in XML and JSON formats.

I left the session and caught the train home with lots of bright ideas and a spring in my step!