The Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) has announced that Italy will be implementing ORCID on a national scale, and has signed a three-year consortium membership agreement with ORCID.
Under the auspices of ANVUR and CRUI (the Conference of Italian University Rectors), 70 universities and four research centers will initially participate in the consortium. This large-scale adoption will underpin the IRIDE (Italian Researcher IDentifier for Evaluation) Project, using a platform developed by Cineca. The project's goal is to ensure that at least 80 percent of Italian researchers have an ORCID iD, with links to their research output back to 2006, by the end of 2016.
As a result of this agreement, Italian researchers and their institutions will benefit from access to and integration with the ORCID registry, including setting up and maintaining disambiguated records for all researchers and linking these to their publications and other research outputs - leading in turn to a simpler, more reliable evaluation process.
ANVUR is Italy's National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Institutes. The agency manages the VQR, a four-year summative national research assessment exercise, in which all Italian universities participate. ANVUR sees the use of ORCID in the VQR as a means to reduce the reporting workload for researchers and administrators alike, while at the same time improving data quality. To this end, ANVUR plans to require researchers participating in the 2011-2014 VQR to register for an ORCID iD, and connect their ORCID record and relevant bibliometric databases with all publications submitted for evaluation.
Cineca, a not-for-profit consortium representing 70 Italian universities, four Italian research institutions, and the Italian Ministry of Education, is responsible for the ORCID implementation. Cineca's role includes creating a central ORCID hub that will facilitate the adoption of the identifier by Italian researchers, enabling immediate use of the API from the member's institution, collecting authorisations required to use the Identifier in multiple services, and providing reporting functionalities. The next step will be to use this approach to provide innovative services such as synchronization and notification. Cineca's intention is to release the Hub as open-source software, to help other countries to profit from this experience. The Hub will be integrated with IRIS, Cineca's RIMS solution based on DSpace-CRIS.
ORCID will be supporting the rollout in Italy with technical help desk advice, an Italian user interface and communications documentation, and a central web interface to enable participating universities to coordinate effort.
