Wizard automates inclusion of grant information in ORCID

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ÜberResearch, a Digital Science portfolio company, has developed a wizard to import funding information into researchers’ ORCID profiles. Working in a similar way to the Scopus wizard for importing information about papers, the new funding wizard helps users to populate automatically the new grant information section of ORCID.

ÜberResearch aims to help scientific funding organisations share information, to help them to make decisions, align their funding strategies and avoid double funding. The company has built up a database of 60 funders around the world, representing $600 billion of historic funding and nearly 1.2 million grants, and is building tools on top of this data.

The company is a member of industry initiatives such as CrossRef and ORCID and so became aware of the moves to include information about grants in researcher portfolios on the author identifier service. ‘As ORCID added a way to share awards, the default was to key in details manually. We already have our global database so we developed a wizard so that researchers could add in all the information in one go,’ explained Christian Herzog, CEO of ÜberResearch. ‘This saves funders having to develop their own wizards.’

The aim of developing this free tool, he said, was to serve authors better, to drive adoption of ORCID and to help the company’s customers and potential customers, the funding bodies. ‘Our aim is also to get other funders to integrate in their data,’ he said. ‘Funders can integrate their data in this way even if they don’t have a commercial arrangement with us,’ he added.

‘We provide the link between grant information and publication information,’ he said. ‘We look at the research world not from the output side but from the input side. This can give researchers a perspective of what is going to be published in the next three to five years.’

An advantage with ORCID that Herzog sees as particularly important when it comes to funding information is that users control who can see their data and when. This means that they can add information to their portfolio about grants from, for example, the military, and still respect confidentiality agreements, he noted.