From: "Meadows, Alice" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 08:57:04 -0400

June 23, 2015

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 which promotes
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 should accelerate adoption and
provide a smoother path to ORCID integration for  UK universities. It
will  ultimately help to 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, 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.

The importance of this endeavor to research is also demonstrated by
the increasing number of funders requesting ORCID identifiers on grant
applications. The Wellcome Trust will make ORCID a mandatory
requirement from August 2015, while both HEFCE and RCUK have shown
high levels of support for the initiative.

In addition, the envisaged enhancements to systems and processes
integrating ORCID should also play an important role in helping
universities respond to funders’ open access (OA) policies, for
example as part of the next REF, supporting the move towards an open
culture. Universities see ORCID as a crucial service, easing the
workload of their researchers in ensuring compliance with OA mandates,
making research more visible and discoverable, and creating
opportunities for international and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

With the launch of the consortium, underpinned by increasing buy-in at
a policy, as well as practical, level, the adoption of ORCID in the UK
has reached a tipping point. Bruce continued: “As part of our work
with UK universities and funders, there is now a consensus that ORCID
is the optimal researcher identifier system. These discussions have
also identified a strong demand for Jisc to establish a UK consortium
to ensure that the inherent benefits of widespread ORCID adoption are
realised. I’m extremely pleased we are now able to offer this
arrangement that will contribute to better research information
management in the UK.”

ORCID is a global, open, not-for-profit, community-driven effort
developed closely with and for the research community.

ORCID provides additional use cases and detailed documentation on
implementation in university or research institution research
information systems. Josh Brown, ORCID’s regional director for Europe,
said: “This agreement is a tremendous step forward for ORCID and all
our partners in the UK. We are very excited to welcome the new members
and integrations to our global community. As well as webinars and
workshops to help UK HEIs to make the most of this opportunity, we
will be helping to develop new services for researchers and research
data via our European projects and Jisc’s research data spring.”

To find out how to sign up for national consortium membership please go to:

http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/Overview/Index/2235.

Notes to editors

ORCID is a not-for-profit organisation supported by a global community
of members, including research organisations, publishers, funders,
professional associations, and other stakeholders in the research
ecosystem.

In the UK ORCID has been widely endorsed by a broad group of funders
and sector bodies including HEFCE, RCUK, HESA, UCISA, ARMA, Wellcome
Trust, RLUK, SCONUL, and Jisc.

About Jisc:

Jisc offers digital services and solutions for UK education and
research. The charity does this to achieve its vision for the UK to be
the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the
world.

Working together across the higher education, further education and
skills sectors, Jisc provides trusted advice and support, reduces
sector costs across shared network, digital content, IT services, and
procurement negotiations, ensuring the sector stays ahead of the game
with research and development for the future.

Find out more at: www.jisc.ac.uk or contact the press team on [log in to unmask]

About ORCID:

ORCID (http://orcid.org) is a community-driven, non-profit
organisation that aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in research
and scholarly communications.  ORCID maintains a central registry of
unique identifiers for individual researchers, and provides open and
transparent processes for connecting ORCID iDs with persistent
identifiers for people, organizations, and research activities and
outputs.  Connecting these identifiers can improve the research and
scholarly discovery process, reduce reporting burdens, increase the
efficiency of research funding, and support sharing and collaboration
within the research community.  For more information contact Laurel
Haak, ORCID Executive Director, at [log in to unmask]

________________________________


Alice Meadows
Director of Communications, ORCID
[log in to unmask]
+1 857-559-3337
orcid.org/0000-0003-2161-3781