ORCID consortium to improve UK research visibility

ORCID, a researcher identifier solution which enables a wide range of improvements to the scholarly communications ecosystem, will now be offered to UK higher education institutions through a national consortium arrangement operated by Jisc, a UK charity promoting the use of technology within education and research.

The agreement, negotiated by Jisc Collections, will enable universities to benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support. This is aimed at accelerating adoption and provide a smoother path to ORCID integration for  UK universities – and,  ultimately, to help transform the management, re-use, and efficiency of the UK research output by improving the integration of research systems and processes, and enhancing data quality.  

More than 50 UK universities have expressed an interest in joining an ORCID consortium in 2015, with a further 22 saying they intend to join at a later stage.

Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer at Jisc, said: 'Previously it has not been possible to easily associate valuable research outputs - be they patents or papers – with their authors, collaborators and institutions. This has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced.

'The result? Ineffective reporting and sharing of research, which impacts on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles. Wider adoption and use of ORCID is the solution, helping the UK continue to deliver a first-class research system and offering other benefits, such as additional cost savings and efficiencies.'

Acting as a hub that connects with institutional, funder, publisher, and other researcher identifier systems, ORCID supports the reuse of data through the automation of processes and data exchange.

Feedback from a recent pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organisations that have adopted ORCID expect to see measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation – especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders – with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.