Recommendation to the center managements to implement measures to actively encourage the use of ORCID by their staff

[Status: Under development, Date: 2023/12/20 16:50, Version: 001]

The Helmholtz Association is determined to make their data available according to the FAIR principles, thus making it findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. In order to achieve interoperability of datasets among various data infrastructures (DIS) within the Helmholtz Association, a common and agreed procedure to refer to people within and across the DIS is needed.

In order to be able to uniquely and sustainably identify both researchers and employees in data infrastructures and repositories in the Helmholtz Association, the respective person should always be referenced with a persistent identifier (PID) (see recommendation M0).

For the Helmholtz Association we recommend to use ORCID to refer to people and contributors to resources in data infrastructures and repositories of the Helmholtz Association wherever possible (see recommendation M1.0). To be able to implement this measure, several activities need to be conducted by different stakeholder groups. This recommendation M1.1. calls for activity of the center managements.

It is recommended, that center management should

1. Employ measures and incentives to actively encourage all employees to register with ORCID and to keep their metadata current and share the relevant parts of this data with the center.

2. Keep record of their staffs ORCIDs and share them with the RDM teams, where appropriate, in order to record ORCIDs with their output.

3. Become an ORCID member to integrate ORCID metadata within the centers' publication system and ensure the long-term sustainability of the ORCID identifier.

Precondition 1: The ORCID Registry is available for all researchers, maintained and further developed.

Parent: 1.0

Dependent: none

Other: 1.2, 1.3

Emanuel Söding (HMC@GEOMAR), Andrea Pörsch (HMC@GFZ)

According to recommendation 1.0 the use of ORCID is recommended in all Helmholtz Data Infrastructures to identify people and contributors to resources in data infrastructures and repositories of the Helmholtz Association wherever possible.

See recommendation 1.0 for more information on why ORCID is recommended for use within the Helmholtz Association.

According to the terms of use, ORCIDs can only be registered and maintained by their owners, hence by researchers or people for themselves. The registration and maintenance are free. Users may choose what data they wish to deploy with their ORICD registration and which of that data should be made public. Users can also grant permission to certain agents, to update their ORCID data in various aspects, i.e. publishers may ask for permission to link publications with ORCIDs and DOIs, or organizations may link their members with ORICD records to identify them.

Organizations cannot enforce the use or ORCIDs by their employees and cannot register ORCIDs for them. This creates the dilemma, that they cannot rely on the existence of ORCIDs for every employee.

In order to make use of ORCIDs as a reference to people, they must therefore actively create incentives for the employees to maintain their ORICD records and also to grant permission to keep records and update relevant data to the organization relating to their work. These relations may e.g. be publications of articles, data sets, software developed or maintained, the technical responsibility for machines or labs.

Organizations must also implement administrative processes, to keep record of the ORCIDs of their employees where granted permission to do so. This can e.g. be done within the personnel department and / or the libraries, in order to be able to refer to employees by ORCID and to know, what permissions were granted to the organization to use the ORCID.

Motivation

The Helmholtz Association is determined to make their data available according to the FAIR principles, thus making it findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. In order to achieve interoperability of datasets among various data infrastructures (DIS) within the Helmholtz Association, a common and agreed procedure to refer to people within and across the DIS is needed.

In order to be able to uniquely and sustainably identify both researchers and employees in data infrastructures and repositories in the Helmholtz Association, the respective person should always be referenced with a persistent identifier (PID) (see recommendation 1.0).

To be able to implement this measure, several activities need to be conducted by different stakeholder groups. This recommendation 1.1. calls for activity of the center managements / organizations.

see recommendation M1.0

a. Suggested procedures to be implemented

• Organizations should adopt a policy, encouraging all employees to register an ORCID and publish relevant data about their employer within their ORCID.
• During the hiring process, organizations should ask all employees about their ORCID, take record of the ID if it exists, or encourage them to register one if it doesn't. They should also encourage future employees to update their ORICD with current affiliations, and publish the relevant data.
• Organzations should share this information with their libraries and data management teams during the internal onboarding process of employees.

b. Incentives

• the use of ORCID allows to automate the acquisition of metadata with publications and data sets. Authors may therefore save significant time and work by avoiding to submit metadata about themselves and their employers, i.e. when submitting an ORICD as an author or contributor, the respective public metadata can be retrieved from ORCID and doesn't have to be provided separately. Proper attribution of publications and data sets could improve the employees internal publication record.
• It is recommended to acknowledge data publications in a similar manner as scientific publications in journals, which means, that they count towards all employees annual achievements and count towards performance based funding schemes.

c. Data Privacy

• data privacy managers should be informed about how ORICD is encouraged by the center management. Data privacy officers should approve the procedures implemented to manage ORCID in the centers.

d. ORCID not present

• In cases where an ORCID is not available for a person, we recommend the following procedure:
  • leave the field empty [this recommendation could be improved]
  • encourage person to register an ORCID

It is recommended, that center managements should

1. Employ measures and incentives to actively encourage all employees to register with ORCID and to keep their metadata current and share the relevant parts of this data with the center.

2. Keep record of their staffs ORCIDs and share them with the RDM teams, where appropriate, in order to record ORCIDs with their output.

3. Become an ORCID member to integrate ORCID metadata within the centers' publication system and ensure the long-term sustainability of the ORCID identifier.

Note 1: regarding activity 1, there exist multiple possible ways to encourage employees to register and maintain their ORCIDs. These could e.g. be sharing information about the benefits of traceable information for the center and science as a whole, benefits for their department, by being able to track the departments scientific output, benefits to themselves, for not repeatedly being asked for permissions to use their data. It is also possible, that prices or rewards are issued to persons sharing their data. Due to the many way this can be envisioned, particular implementation scenarios will be collected below.

Note 2: regarding activity 2, we recommend to make the collection of the ORCID, the granting of permission and the agreement to use and update the ORCID data a structural part of the employment process conducted by the personnel department. Forms may be developed registering the necessary data and signing off on the use, informational leaflets may inform the person about the circumstances, how and where the data is used, and how they can revoke permissions to use it. These procedures should comply with the legal requirements in data protection e.g. the GDPR (DSGVO). The processes implemented will be briefly documented below.

• Center has employed what procedure (describe) or incentive (describe) to encourage employees to use ORCID.
• Center has employed measures to keep record of their staff’s ORCIDs and permissions.

(DataCite: XML / JSON, ISO: XML, Schema.org … [open / still to be done] )

a) DataCite Metadata Schema 4.4, Released 30 Mar 2021 https://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.4/example/datacite-example-affiliation-v4.xml [Website opened on 2022-1-18]

[1] ORCID Terms of use: https://info.orcid.org/terms-of-use/