On June 22, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) organised an information session on the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) and its benefits and uses. The event was held to kick off the campaign to get as many Leiden researchers as possible to claim their ORCID id and to add it to our local research information system, LUCRIS.

The speakers were Maaike Duine, THOR Training and events officer at ORCID, Matthew Buys, ORCID's Regional Director EMEA, Peter Verhaar the UBL's ORCID implementation project team leader, and Mieneke van der Salm, ORCID implementation project team member and author of this blog post. We had about 18 people in attendance and what was particularly encouraging was that those present represented a broad range of academia, including staff from the Faculties of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Medicine, Sciences, and Humanities.

The afternoon started off with Peter giving an introduction on ORCID and what the current possibilities are in Leiden. He explained briefly why ORCID was necessary and how it has become an increasingly standard pillar in the scholarly infrastructure. ORCID is steadily being integrated in the information flows of funders, publishers, and research institutions. Working from the credo "Enter Once, Reuse Often" ORCID can be used to link an author to their work from manuscript submission to registration in their institution's research information system. An example of how such a work flow might look can be seen in Peter's slide on the crossref auto-updater. Peter also explained how linking your ORCID to the Leiden University research information system (LUCRIS) will allow you to easily update the CRIS with newly published works through ORCID.

This last thing is also one of the main objectives of the ORCID implementation project at Leiden University. We want to stimulate authors to claim their ORCID id and to register it in LUCRIS. Next to the fact that it makes an important contribution to the central goals of Open Science, it will also allow Leiden University to have a more complete coverage of Leiden research and publications in our CRIS. Our project has currently landed in the phase of raising awareness and together with our student assistant we hope to be able to reach out to all of our Leiden researchers and help them claim an ORCID and link it to the CRIS. An additional benefit to linking your ORCID id to LUCRIS is that it will allow you to login into ORCID with your institutional account, which means you don't have to remember yet another password.

After Peter concluded his introduction, Maaike Duine explained more about persistent identifiers (PIDs) in general and the work of Project THOR in particular. THOR stands for Technical and Human Infrastructure for Open Research. It aims to make PIDs more pervasive in the research cycle and familiarise researchers with their uses. Funded under Horizon2020, THOR has numerous partners, both non-profit and commercial. One of the products they've created is the THOR Knowledge Hub, which gives a great overview of all available PIDs and their possible uses. They've also created a THOR Dashboard which shows the adoption of the various PIDs during the project's existence, which shows the steady increase of their usage. But it also showed that growth across global regions is uneven and that not all disciplines are represented equally.

After Maaike had given us an overview of Project THOR, Matthew Buys went into more depth about ORCID, its properties and applications. He broke down the problems ORCID aims to solve and explained how. He showed how ORCID makes information more dependable through authentication, and that the system collects, displays, connects, and synchronises data across different information systems.

After Matthew's in-depth presentation on ORCID, it was my turn to conclude the session with a discussion where I turned the tables and asked our audience a question: how would they suggest we would best be able to reach their colleagues and convince them to claim their ORCID if they haven't yet? The suggestions ranged from organising lunch meetings, to visiting research groups, giving practical suggestions on how to fill your ORCID quickly with all your publications instead of having to manually enter all of them, to just being where the researchers are.

The questions that were asked of us often had to do with privacy and what happened with all the data that ORCID collected. As far as privacy is concerned, the answer is simple; it is all in your control. From your settings you can control who can view your information, who can update your record and rescind that permission at any time. They also have extensive privacy and data policies on their website.

All in all, it was an interesting gathering that provided us with a lot of food for thought on how to better serve our researchers. While we already offer support in the form of practical help with registration, whether via email, phone or in person, we certainly hope to be able to extend the integration of ORCID into our systems in the coming months.

If you'd like to contact us for more information you can reach us via email at cds@library.leidenuniv.nl or via the contact form here on the blog.