Researcher identifiers: National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation

Introduction and background

Knowledge Exchange is a collaboration between five national organisations, DFG – the German research Foundation, Jisc – the UK’s champion for digital technologies in education and research, DEFF – Denmark’s Electronic Research Library, SURF – the ICT organisation for Dutch higher education and research and CSC – the IT Centre for Science in Finland. These five key national bodies within Europe are working together to support the use and development of ICT infrastructure for higher education and research.

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Three years later, some of the world’s largest research funders, institutions and publishers have integrated ORCID identifiers into their systems and workflows. As of June 2015, ORCID has issued 1.4 million identifiers. ISNI holds public records of over 8 million individuals of which 2.25 million are researchers. At the same time, ISNI and ORCID have taken steps to define system interoperability and have developed an ISNI to ORCID search and linktool. Currently, ORCID uses Ringgold/ISNI organisation identifiers for its affiliation module.

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In June 2015, KE brought together representatives from its five member countries for a Knowledge Exchange Workshop on National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation. The aim of the workshop was to share national perspectives on ORCID and ISNI, including the challenges, solutions and lessons learned with regards to implementation of ORCID and ISNI on a national scale. Issues discussed included legal and regulatory challenges, authentication and integration and also outstanding issues of functionality, interoperability, policy and sustainability.

This report gives an account of the meeting and presents some outstanding challenges, some possible solutions and begins to take stock and look ahead; what lessons have we learned that should we take into account when moving on to organisational and other identifiers?

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