Ten years on, most of our readers will have heard of ORCID by now in one context or another. Many publishers now ask you to include an ORCID when you submit a journal article, and increasing numbers of funders, including Wellcome, require the use of an ORCID when applying for funding. The new UKRI funding service will also require ORCIDs for at least PIs.

In case you don’t know much about ORCID here are the facts:

• ORCID is a free, unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship and innovation activities. ​
• Its core purpose is to distinguish individuals from one another, this means that people with identical names, or who have changed their name can be accurately attributed works.
• It also provides a portable and open profile which can collate and display your works including recognition for grant application review and peer review activity.
• ORCID profiles are independent of any institution and can remain with you throughout your career.
• This open profile also facilitates auto-population of manuscript submission and grant application systems, reducing duplication of effort.​
• The ORCID profile can also populate itself using in-built tools that pull data from the DOI registry and various publishers and aggregators.

The use of an ORCID can also make it easier to record your outputs in RPS. Connecting your ORCID to RPS can make the outputs identified more accurate and makes it much easier for you to comply with OA mandates including for the REF as well as keep your UCL profile up to date. It is also possible to set it up to automatically push data to your ORCID profile, so that when you record a publication in RPS, it is automatically sent to your ORCID profile.

There are two options for connecting an ORCID to RPS:

1. A ‘read’ connection means that RPS will find records that belong to you, using your ORCID iD, and claim them to your RPS record. This means that, unlike records that RPS finds using your name and institution, you don’t need to claim these records manually.
2. A ‘read and write’ connection will both claim publications that can be matched by ORCID iD and send publications to your ORCID record. This avoids duplication of effort when publications need to be recorded manually.

We recommend using the ‘read and write’ version of the connector as this will keep both your RPS record, UCL Profile and ORCID in sync. Take a look at our instructions on the website or download the PDF guide.​ Nearly 70% of UCL research staff have connected their ORCID to RPS but less than 40% are taking advantage of read and write. To take advantage of the full functionality, reconnect your ORCID to RPS today!

Get involved!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

 

 

 

This year we are pleased to be able to share with you our Advent Calendar of Research Support! We will be posting every day over on our Twitter/X account but for those of you that aren’t using Twitter/X we have posted it below, and you can visit it online in your own time. We will also be updating this post throughout the month with accessible version of the content.

Day 1

The Office for Open Science and Scholarship is your one stop shop for advice and support for all things openness. Find out more on our website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-office-open-science-and-scholarship #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. A Christmas tree with white lights at night in front of columns lit with colours of the rainbow.

Day 2

Profiles is UCL’s new public search and discovery tool showcasing the UCL community. Use it to find UCL academics, their activities, collaborations, industry partnerships, publications and more. Profiles replaces the previous IRIS system: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-profiles #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mat Wright on UCL imagestore. A girl with dark hair and wire rimmed glasses wearing a yellow jumper sits at a laptop. In the background can be seen colourful book stacks.

Day 3

If you need a more controlled way of sharing your research data, check out the UK Data Service and its granular controls for accessing data. https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/learning-hub/research-data-management/data-protection/access-control/ #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Walter Salinas Lopez on UCL imagestore. Six people in office attire facing a bright yellow wall covered in postit notes

Day 4

Our final UCL Profiles training session of the year will be held on 7 December at 12pm. Come along to find out how to update your profile and manage your professional and teaching activities in RPS. https://library-calendars.ucl.ac.uk/calendar/libraryskillsUCL?t=g&q=profiles&cid=6984&cal=6984&inc=0

If you can’t make the session, have a look at our Getting started with Profiles page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-profiles #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. A mixed group of people around a table working at laptops.

Day 5

Are you interested in citizen science or participatory research? Ever wondered whether such an approach might work for your project? Whether you are new to citizen science or if you’ve run projects including participants before, come and join our informal UCL Citizen Science community to exchange ideas, ask for advice or share your stories! #ResearchSupportAdvent https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3aEU3Ia83bPWRqzrGpqQ1KkqlQ0AC5f4Ip8Y-zclJ-PHc1%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=54f252f7-db72-40df-8faf-20e618d9a977&tenantId=1faf88fe-a998-4c5b-93c9-210a11d9a5c2

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. A group of three women in warm clothing toasting with cups of coffee at night.

Day 6

Ever hit a paywall when trying to access scholarly publications? Get the popcorn ready, and be prepared to have your eyes opened by watching this documentary ‘Paywall: the Business of Scholarship’ at https://paywallthemovie.com/ #OpenAccess #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. A plate of mince pies.

Day 7

Have you ever received an unsolicited email from a publisher inviting you to publish your research in their journal? Think, Check, before you submit. https://thinkchecksubmit.org/ #ThinkCheckSubmit #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image from ThinkCheckSubmit. Traffic lights containing the words Think, Check, Submit.

Day 8

If you’re sharing your data using the UCL Research Data Repository, reserve your DOI when you create the item. Then when you submit a paper for publication you can include it in the data access statement and readers will be able to find your data more easily once the data is published. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management/ucl-research-data-repository #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by UCL Media Services on UCL imagestore. A close up of a bright purple bauble on a tree with some blue lights.

Day 9

Are festive songs, recipes and party activities protected by copyright? How does this relate to your research? Answers in our latest copyright blog post: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/copyright/#ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik. Blue headphones surrounded by christmas decorations, stockings, candles, tree lights and pine cones.

Day 10

UCL Press has launched the first #openaccess textbook in its new programme today. Take a look here: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/215121. Interested in publishing an #openaccess textbook with us? Find out more: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/textbooks

Image by UCL Press. Image is a red band on a white background. On the red band, white writing reads, ‘An introduction to Waste management and circular economy. Read and download free from uclpress.co.uk/waste.

Day 11

If you’ve encountered a paywall when trying to read research online, Unpaywall (https://unpaywall.org/) and the Open Access Button (https://openaccessbutton.org/) are two free browser extensions which search the internet for copies that you can access. #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. A close up of a Christmas tree covered in yellow lights and small silver leaves. In the background can be seen a grey building, some leafless trees and a dark grey statue of a man.

Day 12

Do you have a namesake in the world of research? To ensure that other researchers and publishers are not confusing you with someone else, sign up for an ORCID ID at https://orcid.org/ ORCID brings all your scholarly output together in one place. Read more here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access/orcid-ucl-researchers #ResearcherIDs #ORCID #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by John Moloney on UCL imagestore. A group of people in business attire socialising with drinks. Picture is taken from a distance and slightly above.

Day 13

Grey literature is produced and published by non-commercial private or public entities, including pressure groups, charities and organisations. Researchers often use grey literature in their reviews to bring in other ‘voices’ into their research. We have listed some useful sources on our guide: https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/planning-search/grey-literature #literaturereview #greyliterature #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Irrum Ali on UCL imagestore. A white table covered in books and pamphlets of various sizes.

Day 14

Are you working with personal data and need more advice on the difference between anonymisation and pseudonymisation? Check out the data protection team’s guide or get in touch with them for more advice. #ResearchSupportAdvent https://www.ucl.ac.uk/data-protection/guidance-staff-students-and-researchers/practical-data-protection-guidance-notices/anonymisation-and

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. Two large and several small icicles against a wintery sky.

Day 15

Historical Inquiry is an important part of the research process. A place to begin this is by understanding the etymology of words. Raymond Williams began this by collating keywords of the most used terms. However, the meanings of words change over time, depending on context. The University of Pittsburgh has continued this project: https://keywords.pitt.edu/, and we have their publication in the Library. #HistoricalInquiry #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mat Wright on UCL imagestore. A student with long blonde hair studies in the foreground. Behind her are rows of wooden desks and book stacks in arches sit further back.

Day 16

Did you know the Research Data Management team can review your Data Management Plan and provide feedback, including to make sure you adhere to funder guidance on data management? Get in touch to send us a plan or find out more. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. UCL front quad at twilight. In front of the portico is a Christmas tree decorated with yellow lights. To the right of the image is a leafless tree decorated with purple and pink lights which can be seen reflecting off the white building beyond.

Day 17

From 2024, UKRI funded long-form outputs must be open access within 12 months of publication under CC BY or another Creative Commons licence. UCL’s Open Access Team has info. including funding & exceptions, and offers support: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access/research-funders/new-wellcome-and-ukri-policies/ukri #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by James Tye on UCL imagestore. Image shows a view through a gap in books to a woman with light brown hair holding the books open and appearing to be searching the shelf.

Day 18

To coincide with the new UKRI open access policy for monographs, UCL Library Services has new funding to support all UCL REF-eligible staff who would like to make their monographs, book chapters and edited collections Gold open access. Find out about this funding and how to contact us: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access/open-access-funding-and-agreements/open-access-funding #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. Image shows a Christmas garland over and arch with people walking through, slightly out of focus. The garland is threaded with yellow lights and the words Happy Holiday Season are written in pink lights.

Day 19

Interested in adding grey literature into your research? Have a look at Overton – a database of 10m+ official and policy documents http://libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/login?url=https://app.overton.io/dashboard.php#ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Tony Slade from UCL imagestore. A top-down photograph of four students working individually at wooden desks. To the right of the image are wooden bookcases full of colourful books.

Day 20

Have time in your hands this holiday? Complete our short, fun, Jedi-friendly copyright online tutorial and be copyright-savvy before the new year begins! Access at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/forms/articulate/copyright-essentials/#/ #ResearchSupportAdvent

A screenshot from the UCL Copyright Essentials module. Includes information on the topics covered, some text from the module and an image of a group of stormtroopers marching in the street. Includes image by Michael Neel via Wikimedia Commons.

Day 21

Beat the cold with #openaccess reading! UCL Press have more than 300 open access books and 15 journals for you to read and download- for free! Available from: uclpress.co.uk

Image by Tony Slade on UCL imagestore. A close-up perspective shot of a bookcase. Black books with gold writing are in the foreground and red, orange and blue volumes are further back.

Day 22

Have you made your New Year resolutions yet? Start by developing your copyright knowledge. Register for one of our 2024 workshops to learn how copyright supports your research and learning. #ResearchSupportAdvent https://library-calendars.ucl.ac.uk/calendar/libraryskillsUCL/?cid=-1&t=g&d=0000-00-00&cal=-1&ct=32648&inc=0

Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik. Top view of hand holding a pen on spiral notebook with new year writing and drawings decoration accessories on black background.

Day 23

Curious to see who’s talking about your research? You can see a dashboard for all your RPS publications in the Altmetric tool – search by “verified author”. https://www.altmetric.com/explorer/#ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. An arm and hand in profile holds up a mobile phone with the camera open. The phone shows the UCL portico and Christmas tree. The background is out of focus but appears to show Christmas lights.

Day 24

The final day of our #ResearchSupportAdvent is upon us and we want to use it to say thank you to everyone that has supported us, come to our events, training or shared with us. Also our colleagues and friends from other institutions. All of us here in the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship and beyond across all of the teams represented wish you a great break and look forward to 2024!

New for the academic year 2021-22 the Office for Open Science and Scholarship is organising a monthly series of talks, showcases and training sessions across as many of the eight pillars as we can fit in for UCL colleagues and students at all levels.

All of the teams will be teaching their usual classes, keep watching your usual sources of training plus here and on Twitter for those, but these introductory sessions are intended to give a general overview of each subject area for a general audience with plenty of opportunities for discussion and questions. These introductory sessions will also be supplemented with ad hoc events throughout the year.

• November
  Departmental UKRI Briefings – contact catherine.sharp@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a briefing for your team
• December
  Introduction to the Office for Open Science & Scholarship – December 15th 2-3pm – Postponed, please express interest below
• January 22
  Introduction to responsible metrics – January 27th 2-3pm – Online
• February
  Introduction to Research Data Management – February 2nd 10-11am – Online
• March
  Getting started with the RDR – Friday 4th Mar 10-11am – Online
• April
  Open Science Conference (Dates TBC)
• May
  Citizen Science project showcase (Details & Dates TBC)
• June
  Citizen Science, Public Engagement & Research Impact (Dates TBC)
• July
  ORCiD, DOI and beyond – Introduction to Persistent identifiers (Dates TBC)

If you are interested in any of the sessions above then please complete the MS form and the organisers will get back to you with calendar details and joining instructions for planned sessions. Any sessions without firm dates, we will contact you as soon as details are confirmed.

There are a number of ways that having an ORCiD can be useful:

• you can use it to distinguish yourself from other researchers, especially if you have a common name,
• you can use your ORCiD to easily find and connect to your outputs, activities, contributions and affiliations
• your ORCiD iD can also be used in place of a publications list or CV in applications to present your full list of contributions in one place
• and finally, you can connect your ORCiD to a growing number of institutions, funders, and publishers, including RPS here at UCL.

Linking your ORCiD to your account in RPS can have a number of additional benefits, key among which is to improve the accuracy of the auto-claiming of your publications. In addition to this, you can also allow RPS to send publications that you claim over to ORCID on your behalf, called ‘Read and Write’ in the table below.

School	ORCID Read & Write in RPS – Jun 21	Total ORCID in RPS – Jun 21
IOE	42%	77%
BEAMS	30%	73%
SLMS	29%	71%
SSEES	13%	76%
SLASH	22%	66%
Total	29%	71%

Back in January 22% of research staff had linked their ORCiD to RPS and were using it to send content from RPS to their ORCID record. Now, 6 months later that total has increased to 29% with IOE leading the way with an impressive 42% of research staff using this feature.

Overall, over 70% of research staff at UCL have linked their ORCID to RPS in some way, but that means that there are still some people that aren’t taking advantage of this and using their ORCiD to its best effect.

To get more information about how to add your ORCiD to RPS, take a look at the guide provided by the Open Access team, or one of our previous blog posts that outlines more information about the ways to best use your ORCiD.

The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) describes 14 roles that represent the parts typically played by contributors to a scholarly output. The CRediT taxonomy has been adopted across a growing range of publishers to improve the visibility of the range of contributors to published research outputs. The established list of publishers and individual journals that use the roles is available online and also includes a few submission, peer review and research workflow tools.

The taxonomy also brings a number of additional practical benefits to the research environment, including:

• Reduce the potential for author disputes.
• Enable visibility and recognition of the different contributions of researchers, particularly in multi-authored works – across all aspects of the research being reported (including data curation, statistical analysis, etc.)
• Support identification of peer reviewers and specific expertise.
• ​Enable funders to more easily identify those responsible for specific research products, developments or breakthroughs.
• Improve the ability to track the outputs and contributions of individual research specialists and grant recipients.
• Easy identification of potential collaborators and opportunities for research networking.
• Enable new indicators of research value, use and re-use, credit and attribution​.

We have recently added information about the CRediT taxonomy to the Open Access website, to make sure that you can get all information related to publishing your research in the same place, and as always, the Office for Open Science & Scholarship, and the Open Access team are available to answer any questions you may have on this or any other related topic.

CRediT updates

In April 2020 the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the formal launch of its work to develop the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) as a full ANSI/NISO standard.

Later in 2020, CRediT was awarded grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Wellcome Trust. The funds will be used to support implementations of the taxonomy across scholarly publishers, and within the scholarly research ecosystem more broadly once the standard is established.

During the early part of 2021, ORCID officially started supporting CRediT. As part of the upgraded API, journals can share CRediT contributions with ORCID and include them in your ORCID record. For more information about ways to automate updates to your ORCID record, check out our blog post on the subject.

Over the past year, we have written a number of blog posts talking about ORCID and giving you lots of options for how you can make the best use of your ORCID, including using it to add your research outputs to RPS, and a series of ways that you can automatically populate your ORCID and save time! While all of these posts are still relevant, and we would recommend you having a look, there are a few updates that we wanted to share with you.

ORCID have recently added Data Management Plan as a new work-type you can include in your ORCID, which is great news. In addition to this, ORCID have now made it possible to record funding peer review contributions in your ORCID record by linking your ORCID to Je-S, increasing the number of work types you can add to ORCID to 44!

ORCID have also relaunched the help and support part of their website info.orcid.org to make it easier to access updates, FAQs and blog posts. I really enjoyed this recent post in which they interviewed Dr. Romero-Olivares, assistant professor at New Mexico State University, about her experiences using ORCID throughout her career and the ways that having an ORCID has made maintaining her CV easier over the years.

After this blog was published, ORCID also announced that they have started supporting CRediT – the Contributor Roles Taxonomy. This is a great step, and so keep an eye out if you have published in a journal that uses CRediT to add this to your ORCID record soon!

Finally, ORCID have released a new video tour of the ORCID record that you can see below. In addition to their previous video in our prior posts telling you about what ORCID is and its advantages, this video aims to remind you of the key features of the interface and answering a few questions you may have about how to maintain your personal ORCID record.

A Quick Tour of the ORCID Record from ORCID.

Whether you were tucked up in bed early on New Year’s Eve 2020, or come midnight enjoyed what limited indulgences are available nowadays, there’s no doubt that many of us are keen to put 2020 firmly behind us. Here in UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship (OOSS) 2021 appears bright, with lots of exciting developments in open research and open access coming up; but we wanted to spend our first post of the new year unfashionably looking back, and highlighting some of the great things that happened in open access in 2020.

Without further ado, here’s a rundown of some of UCL’s 2020 open access highlights.

• A whopping 16,204 articles and conference papers were uploaded to RPS, to be made (green) open access in UCL Discovery after publisher embargoes.
• 2,003 articles were made gold open access (immediate open access on the publisher’s website), 833 of them through UCL’s transformative agreements. Of the total, 759 were in fully open access journals.
• Transformative agreements made it possible for UCL authors to publish gold open access in more than 5,000 journals (this number will go up as new agreements are signed in the coming weeks), in addition to arrangements for funding papers in fully open access journals.
• The number of open access outputs in UCL Discovery grew by 28%, from 87,672 in January 2020 to 112,506 today.
• UCL’s tremendous contribution to COVID-19 research meant that our colleagues in UCL Press collected 1,032 publications in UCL’s COVID-19 open access collection. At the time of writing, these papers have had 23,505 views.
• 22% of REF-submitted staff started to use our new write to ORCID functionality in RPS to send publications data to their ORCID records.
• All faculties reached – and many far exceeded – 80% compliance with the REF open access policy, measured against all articles and conference proceedings in RPS. Most can report total engagement with open access, for articles and conference papers, of more than 95%.
• Last but by no means least, there were 4,955,892 downloads from UCL Discovery. The top-downloaded outputs were:
  • Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge – 15,300 downloads
  •  Fabricate 2020 – 11,007 downloads
  • The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years – 10,732 downloads
  • The Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe. EUROEVOL Dataset – 10,352 downloads
  • The continuing 2019-nCoV epidemic threat of novel coronaviruses to global health — The latest 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China – 8,906 downloads

Finally – not a number, but an achievement for the Open Access Team nonetheless – we overhauled our open access funding webpages, Wellcome and other funders webpages, and in fact most of our online guidance. Since open access continues to be rather complex, to say the least, we also added a glossary to the webpages. We’ll be making more improvements soon, but hope that you’ve found these ones useful so far.

I’d like to say a thank you to my magnificent colleagues, who’ve processed such huge numbers of papers and kept on top of the ever-growing numbers of enquiries about open access: hard to count, but probably up to a hundred questions every day, many of them very complicated. Thanks also to everyone in the UCL community who works with us to make open access happen. Look out for new transformative agreements coming soon, and very best wishes for a good 2021.

We have written a number of posts recently about ORCID and other identifiers, and another introducing you to a new feature of RPS, but we could tell you wanted more!  

So, as we discussed in our last RPS blog post, you can now link your ORCID iD to RPS, and use it to send your publications from RPS into your ORCID record. Nearly 1,000 UCL researchers have started sending publications from RPS to ORCID in the last 3 months. It’s been possible to use your ORCID iD to find publications for RPS for some time, but there are several different options for how both these things are done, and how much data is sent and received by the two systems, so let’s take a look at them.  

When you link your ORCID iD to RPS in RPS > Menu > MyAccount > ORCID Settings, you’ll be given three options. The first is the most restrictive: Only use my ORCID to support automatic claiming. If you choose this option, RPS won’t access your ORCID record at all. It’ll simply use your ORCID iD to help verify your identity in the papers found in other sources. In essence RPS works exactly the same as it always has, finding publications in external sources like Web of Science and Scopus, but it has one more piece of data to use when it’s identifying your papers. It’ll then claim those papers automatically for you.    

The second option is similar but it does allow RPS to use your ORCID profile. Read data from my ORCID account looks at the content of your ORCID record to improve the accuracy of its searches when it looks for new papers in its usual sources.  

The final option is Read from and write publication data to my ORCID account. This is the best and most useful option, and it also gives you more choices! This option gives RPS permission to send publications to your ORCID record, so you don’t have to add them yourself. It also allows RPS to read the content of your ORCID record to improve the accuracy of its searches when it looks for new papers in its usual sources (as in option 2). 

Read from and write publication data to my ORCID account will send everything from RPS to your ORCID record, but you can select some restrictions as follows:  

1. You can choose to only send Published journal articles to your ORCID. This means that articles that have the status of accepted, submitted, in preparation or no status won’t be sent. This will also apply to pre-prints where these have been added to RPS.  

1. You can choose whether or not to send publications where your relationship to them has been marked as private. It won’t stop them ending up in a co-author’s ORCID record, but it will stop them appearing in yours.  

1. You can choose to send only your favourite publications. This option is good if you want to curate your ORCID for use as a CV, if you have a large number of papers coming into RPS and ORCID from different sources, such as pre-print servers, or if most of your publications are already in your ORCID record and you want to avoid duplicates. The downside of this option is that you need to remember to favourite each new paper as it goes into RPS – it’s not a big thing, but it will slow the process down. 

Whichever option you choose, make sure you add your ORCID to RPS, but it is equally important that you use it elsewhere – link it to other systems, and especially to your publications, grants, and even Je-S. The more you use your ORCID, the more reliable it becomes as an identifier, and as a representation of your work all in one place!  

You might have heard the phrase ‘Persistent Identifier’ or even PID in passing, but what does it actually mean?  

“A persistent identifier (PID) is a long-lasting reference to a resource. That resource might be a publication, dataset or person. Equally it could be a scientific sample, funding body, set of geographical coordinates, unpublished report or piece of software. Whatever it is, the primary purpose of the PID is to provide the information required to reliably identify, verify and locate it.” – OpenAIRE 

These identifiers either connect to a set of metadata describing an item, or link to the item itself.  

In 2018, the Tickell report was released. It presented independent advice about Open Access, which had implications for the world of PIDs. Adam Tickell recommended that Jisc lead a project to select and promote a range of unique identifiers for different purposes, to try and limit the amount of confusion and duplication in this area.  

The JISC project has been in progress for the last year. They are working on what they describe as ‘priority PIDs’ which cover the following categories:  

• People 
• Works 
• Organisations 
• Grants 
• Projects 

So what are the PIDs we need to be aware of? 

People 

The primary PID for people is one that you will already be familiar with if you are a regular reader of the blog. Even if you aren’t, you have probably heard of it – it’s ORCID.  

ORCID is an open identifier for individuals that allows you to secure accurate attribution for all of your outputs. It also functions quite nicely as an online bibliography, and can be used to automatically collect and record your papers in RPS. All in all, it’s pretty useful!  

If you want to know more about what you can do with ORCID, have a look at our recent blog post ‘Getting the best out of your ORCID’. All of the details about linking ORCID to RPS and vice versa, are available on the blog and the Open Access website.  

Works 

The next identifier is for works. It’s another that you have probably seen, even if you don’t know a lot about them: DOI. DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier. It’s a unique registration number for a Digital Object. This could be an article or a dataset, but it could equally be an image, a book, or even a chapter in a book. DOIs are unique and persistent which means that if your chosen journal changes publisher, you will still be able to find your article because the DOI is independent and will keep up to date.  

DOIs are most often acquired through a Registration Agency called Crossref, but you will also come across DataCite. Both of these services do the same job, providing and tracking DOIs, but the underlying tools are slightly different.  

Did you know: if you have the DOI of a paper, an easy way to find that paper is to add https://doi.org/ to the front. The URL this creates will take you to the paper, no matter who published it. For example: 10.1080/08870446.2019.1679373 is a DOI, and https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2019.1679373 will take you straight to the paper.  

Organisations 

The Research Organisation Registry (ROR) is a new PID registry that is being created by key stakeholders, including Crossref and Jisc, to bring more detail and consistency to organisational identifiers. The definition of organisations goes beyond institutions like UCL to include any organisation that is involved in research production or management, so this can include funders, publishers, research institutes and scholarly societies.   

Grants 

Crossref is key in the identification of individual funders and in creating identifiers for research grants. Grant IDs are DOI’s, but connected to grant-specific metadata such as award type, value and investigators. The intent is for funders to register each grant and provide a GrantID, which has the potential to make tracking papers and data linked to individual projects much simpler in the long run. Several hundred grants have been registered already, mostly via Wellcome.  (With thanks to Rachael Lammey for the clarification 03/08/2020)

Projects 

The Jisc project is supporting Research Activity ID (RAiD), a project based in Australia which creates a unique identifier for a research project. The intent is for this to be the final part of a network of identifiers that will allow people, works, and institutions to be linked to their projects and funders. This will complete the chain and allow accurate attribution and accountability at every stage of the research process.   

How can I get involved? 

The work being undertaken to select and support individual PIDs at each stage of the research process is a good idea, and if it works then it will be a step towards a fully interconnected, open and transparent research process. The next stage of the Jisc project is currently underway, and they are surveying all sectors of the UK research community about awareness, use, and experience of PIDs. If you want to contribute, their survey is open and has just been extended until 21 August!  

Last week we wrote about how spending a few minutes setting up your ORCID record will repay you many times over, helping with grant applications, online profiles and the like. We talked about some of the nifty things you can do with ORCID, like creating a QR code to put in a poster or presentation. Most of you already know about “auto-claiming” publications containing your ORCID into RPS (and even “auto-rejecting” others), saving you having to review long lists of publications that match your name. A whopping 72% of UCL researchers, nearly 4,000 of you, have added your ORCID to RPS for auto-claiming.*

Even if you’re using your ORCID whenever you publish, until now it hasn’t been plain sailing getting publications into your ORCID record, especially since this was completely separate from adding them to RPS. There’s now a new tool in RPS that makes this much, much easier.

*By faculty, UCL Institute of Education researchers top the table at 81%.

The old way: using ORCID to record publications

Until now, you’d use “auto-update” in ORCID, from a third-party source like CrossRef, to import publications that contain your ORCID to your ORCID record. To add publications that don’t contain your ORCID, you’d select publications matched to your Scopus record and/or ResearcherID, add them manually, or upload a BibTeX file.

If this sounds like a lot of effort, read on.

The new way: send to ORCID from RPS

You’re already recording your publications in RPS so that you can make them open access, select them for REF, and include them in your IRIS profile. Now, you can send them to your ORCID record automatically. This gives you the added benefits of a permanent ORCID record of your publications, without any extra work.

Take a moment to enable send to ORCID in your RPS profile (see below); then make sure you’re using your ORCID, e-mail address, Scopus ID, arXiv ID and/or ResearcherID to auto-claim publications into your RPS record. Your auto-claimed publications from all of these sources, as well as any you claim yourself based on matches to your name, and any that you add to RPS manually will all be sent to your ORCID record. Job done.

How to do it

For privacy reasons, you need to authorise RPS to send to ORCID, even if you’ve already allowed RPS to talk to your ORCID record for auto-claiming. Even if you’ve forgotten your ORCID password, it should take no more than a minute.

• Click on the Menu tab near the top of your RPS home screen. In the My Account column, choose ORCID Settings.
• Click on Connect your ORCID iD.
• If you’ve previously recorded an ORCID in RPS, you’ll be sent to an ORCID login screen. If you haven’t, but you have an ORCID account, click on Sign into ORCID. (If you don’t have an ORCID at all, you can set one up by choosing Register now).
• Click Authorize to allow RPS to update your ORCID record.
• When you’re sent back to RPS, choose the first option, “read from and write”.

Your existing and new publications will be sent to ORCID automatically within a day or two. Clicking “Run Sync” on this page (see the image in the next section) isn’t necessary, but will speed up the sending. Once publications been added to ORCID, you’ll see an option on this page to remove them; you can also combine, delete and edit them in ORCID.

Extra send to ORCID settings

After you set up send to ORCID, the ORCID Settings page will give you a few options. By default, RPS won’t send journal articles with a status other than “published” or “published online”, nor publications you’ve marked as private (by clicking the eye icon in your publications list). Untick the first box and RPS will send journal article records regardless of their publication status. Tick the second and it’ll send publications even if you’ve marked them as private.

If you want to select specific publications to send, you can tick the option “Only send favourite publications”. You’d use the heart icon in your publications list to select favourites.

We’d suggest that you click “Send affiliation” at the bottom of the page: this will add your UCL affiliation to your ORCID record.

If some of your journal article records in RPS were created manually, they might not have a status. If you don’t want to change the default send to ORCID settings, you can add the “published” or “published online” status to individual records.

More about RPS and ORCID

You’ll find more on our ORCID webpages. For guides to auto-claiming using ORCID, e-mail address, Scopus ID, arXiv ID and/or ResearcherID, and information about how RPS selects publications it thinks are yours, see the section on our RPS training page called “Recording publications in RPS”.

Look out for future posts on RPS and ORCID. To get an alert when we post new articles, fill in the “Subscribe by Email” section on the right of this post (or below, if you’re reading on your phone).