UK research information management and discovery gets boost as RCUK joins national ORCID consortium

Today, Research Councils UK (RCUK) announces it has joined the national consortium for ORCID – the researcher identifier solution that enables a wide range of improvements to the scholarly communications ecosystem – and will be ready to start capturing ORCID identifiers in early 2016.

Offered by Jisc, the framework agreement will enable RCUK to access the benefits of ORCID at reduced costs and with enhanced technical support. It joins almost 50 universities to have taken up membership since the consortium launched in summer 2015.

Importantly, RCUK’s announcement follows a report by Professor James Wilsdon from earlier this year called The Metric Tide, which urged the UK research system to take full advantage of ORCID as its preferred unique ‘iDs’ and for it to become mandatory by the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). This sentiment was reiterated by a joint RCUK and Jisc report, highlighting ORCID as the leading standard for researcher identifiers.

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