ORCID, a non-profit organisation that provides an open registry of unique identifiers for researchers, held its twelfth bi-annual Outreach Meeting, hosted by the University of Illinois in Chicago, on May 21-22, 2014. About 160 individuals from around the world participated. This outreach meeting showcased the integrations, use cases, and outreach efforts at universities and professional societies, including nine Adoption and Integration partner institutions that were supported by a grant to ORCID from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The variety and depth of integration work being carried out by the community was impressive, demonstrating significant progress implementing ORCID identifiers across campus systems. Nearly 60 universities are now ORCID members.
Joshua Greenberg, Sloan Foundation Director of Digital Resources, said in his opening remarks that ORCID iDs are central to the integrity of the scholarly record, particularly as new forms of scholarship evolve. Barbara Allen of the CIC highlighted the promise of ORCID as a durable persistent ID for enabling the discoverability of lifelong research contributions. Karen Butler-Purry of Texas A&M echoed this in her comments, commenting on the role of ORCID in relation to understanding student success. Neil Jacobs provided an overview of the Jisc consultation on ORCID, which is culminating in an ORCID Pilot project in the UK. Yan Shuai of Tsinghau University spoke on the need for name disambiguation in the Chinese researcher community, and summarised the challenges of embedding ORCID into research culture and systems.
More than a dozen institutions, among them Purdue University, Chalmers University of Technology, and the University of Michigan demonstrated how they were integrating ORCID into their systems.
Participants spoke about the technical aspects of their projects. Michael Witt from Purdue University remarked that using the ORCID API was "straightforward, well-documented and well-supported." ORCID provides a comprehensive Knowledge Base of documentation, and an open developer's sandbox to help support integration and innovation. Support for ORCID has been integrated into the source code of many research information platforms, making adoption even easier for organisations.
The ORCID Technical Team also held a Codefest simultaneous to the Outreach Meeting.
