Project partners of the ORCID DE 2 project
As an open infrastructure that is embedded in its community, DataCite is involved in various projects to promote our vision of connecting research and identifying knowledge through persistent identifiers (PIDs). Within the German ORCID DE 2 project, DataCite led the work package on organization identifiers – including ROR. This guest blog post by Antonia Schrader is a crosspost from the ORCID DE blog outlining the achievements of the ORCID DE 2 project.
On November 30, 2022, the ORCID DE 2 project came to a successful end. The project was funded in two funding phases (2016 to 2019 and 2020 to 2022) by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and initiated by the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI). ORCID plays a central role at the level of national standards, such as the DINI Certificate and the Core Data Set for Research (KDSF), but also at the local level in German academic institutions.
While the focus of the first funding phase was on establishing ORCID across institutions (in 2016, Forschungszentrum Jülich was until then the only scientific institution in Germany working on integrating ORCID into internal systems as an ORCID member, see ORCID DE 1 proposal, p. 3), the activities of the second funding phase from 2020 onwards focused on consolidating the ORCID information infrastructure in Germany.
What was achieved?
The project was able to successfully contribute to the promotion and dissemination of ORCID as a PID for researchers and contributors in Germany on various levels. These include:
- Growing the numbers of ORCID iDs in Germany from 44,000 in 2016 to over 213,000 in 2022
- Establishing and growing the ORCID Germany Consortium (84 members as of Nov 2022)
- Establishment of a dialog platform www.orcid-de.org as the central German-speaking entry point for individuals and institutions interested in ORCID.
- Organizing virtual events to promote knowledge transfer and community building.
- Creation of the ORCID DE Monitor dashboard
- Conducting an extensive survey on the need for and dissemination of organizational IDs in Germany
- Linking ORCID to other PID systems through the claiming services developed by the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) and the German National Library (DNB).
- Fostering the dialogue between the ORCID DE project and ORCID
- One-on-one consultations to individual researchers and academic institutions.
Which role did DataCite play?
In 2019 when the grant proposal was written, PIDs for organizations were an emerging topic and the Research Organization Registry (ROR) was officially launched. Together with Crossref and the California Digital Library, DataCite has been running ROR as an open infrastructure to provide a PID for research organizations.
As a logical consequence, DataCite led the work package seeking to identify the status quo and future requirements of organization identifiers at research institutions in Germany. We conducted an online “Survey on the Need for and Use of Organizational Identifiers at Universities and Non-University Research Institutions in Germany” among 183 research institutions in Germany during the period July 2020 to December 2020. This survey constitutes the largest study on organizational identifiers in Germany to date. Among other things, the survey included questions on the knowledge, distribution, and use of organizational identifiers at research institutions. In addition, requirements for organizational identifiers and their metadata (e. g., relations and granularity) were queried. The findings of the survey were published, contributing to the advancement and an increased awareness of organizational identifiers in Germany; especially, the ROR ID. As soon as the English translation of the German article is available, we will report more about the results in our blog.
What’s next?
As described above, the ORCID DE project partners have started working intensively on linking ORCIDs to other PID systems. To push this interlinking even further, the project partners of ORCID DE submitted a grant proposal for the project “PID Network Germany” to the DFG, which was accepted for funding.
Within PID Network Germany, the project partners have set themselves the goal of establishing a network of research organizations interested in PIDs for researchers, organizations, publications, resources, and infrastructures. In addition to identifying needs and optimization potential for existing PID systems, the project’s findings will lead to recommendations within the framework of a national PID roadmap for Germany.
Building on the knowledge and experience gained from the successful implementation of ORCID DE, the aim is thus to connect PIDs and to improve the metadata quality of publications and resources across disciplines and countries.
Thank you!
The project partners DataCite, the German National Library, the Helmholtz Open Science Office, Bielefeld University Library and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) would like to thank all colleagues and institutions for their active interest and great support.
We are very much looking forward to continuing our conversation with you about PIDs in research and culture in Germany and beyond!
Antonia Schrader
