More bad news ... and some good

We have been trying out the Pure EPrints connector in Pure 4.20.2 Test hoping that this will enable us to at least demonstrate the concept of the transfer of ORCID iDs to the White Rose Research Repository Online. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the EPrints connector that is not related to ORCID. The problem is fixed in Pure 4.20.3 so we will abandon 4.20.2 and look to the moving on to 4.20.3. At time of writing, we have no timescale for the implementation of 4.20.3.

The good news is that the project continues to receive high level support within the University. The Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research now has her ORCID iD in Pure. She also wishes to send out the emails that will launch the full implementation at York.

Pilot stage - initial findings are in

We have just come to the end of our pilot and it's proved a very interesting and useful exercise in preparing us for full implementation. As of 17th November 2014, we had 61 ORCID iDs listed in PURE and 48 responses to our survey. Very encouraging for such a short pilot!

These are some of the lessons that we have learnt from the pilot:

• The Create and Add ORCID iD options in PURE do work but not every researcher found them easy to use. We will need to provide more guidance in the full implementation.
• Many researchers, but not all, recognise the value of ORCID iDs as a unique identifier and would recommend an ORCID iD to their colleagues.
• It is more difficult to convince researchers as to the advantages of adding/creating their ORCID iD in PURE than it is of having an ORCID iD.
• There is an expectation from some researchers that PURE and ORCID are directly linked, e.g. that one will populate the other.
• It is only the iD that our pilot was really concerned with but researchers were unsure whether they should complete an ORCID profile or not.
• If we want to increase the uptake of iDs by PGR students we will need to consider messages/information specifically targeted at them.
• Research administrators can play a key role in encouraging their researchers to create/add ORCID iDs into PURE.

We plan to feedback to our pilot departments to thank them for their input and give them a brief summary of how the pilot went in their department. We also need to award a personalised ORCID mug to our prize draw winner!

The pilot has given us lots of ideas for our full implementation which we are now expecting to launch in January 2015.

Even though the pilot is officially over, we continue to see a slow but steady increase in the number of ORCID iDs in PURE. We have also seen a significant rise in the number of iDs with a york.ac.uk email address recorded on ORCID over the last few months (200 back in June to over 400 now). It would be nice to think that we are starting to make an impact but there must be other influences at work.

Pilot now underway

Today sees the start of our ORCID iD implementation pilot!

We are working with 4 departments (Centre for Health Economics, Environment, Health Sciences and Music). Each of the participants' Departmental Research Committee Chair has circulated an email to their research staff and postgraduate research students (PGRs) with some basic information about ORCID iDs. The email links out to our revised ORCID iD webpage from where researchers can register via PURE and research students via ORCID.

The email also asks researchers and PGRs to give us their views via a Google form survey on ORCID iDs, the ease of registration via PURE or ORCID, and the information that they were provided with.

We hope that the pilot (which runs until 14th November) will help us work towards wider implementation. It will be very interesting to see what the uptake of iDs is within the pilot departments and what feedback we will receive.

PURE 4.19 now live!

Great news! PURE 4.19 is now live. We need to do a little bit more work to set up the ORCID functionality and to update our webpages but we should soon be in a position to switch on the ORCID options.

Next step is to roll out the pilots.

Unfortunately it looks like the EPrints connector work needs to wait for PURE 4.20 but we are still hoping to at least test the concept before the end of the project.

EPrints connector - issue with adding ORCID field

Unfortunately, we have come across another technical issue. The problem this time is around our plans for adding the ORCID iD into our EPrints connector to that it is uploaded to White Rose Research Online (WWRO). On working with White Rose colleagues from Leeds, we have found that the ORCID iD field in PURE is not available for us to map into the data sent to EPrints. This is being followed up with the suppliers of PURE.

Potential pilot departments

Despite the uncertainties created by not knowing when PURE 4.19 will be available, we have been pressing on with the selection of potentially 3 departments to test our ORCID implementation. We will approach 3 relatively small departments, one from the sciences, one from social sciences and one from the arts and humanities.

Fingers crossed for positive responses. We are, of course, stressing the benefits that will accrue to the researchers/departments that take part in any pilot.

Problem with ORCID functionality in PURE 4.18

It is with great disappointment that we've discovered that PURE 4.18 is not going to give us the ORCID functionality that we wanted for our project. PURE 4.18 gives us a field for researchers to add their ORCID iD but the creation and check functions are not working. There is no fix in 4.18. If we want the ORCID functionality that we were looking for we will need to wait for 4.19 to be available to us.

Despite the best efforts of our colleagues, we do not have a timeline for the implementation of 4.19.

Preparations for advocacy; webpage under development

We have now recruited a member of our Academic Liaison team to our project group, Martin Wilkinson. Martin is working with us on the development on a webpage containing key messages around ORCID as well as a range of FAQs. We've gone for a format that highlights 5 key reasons for getting an iD with a main theme of "Distinguish yourself".

We also want to embed a Google form in the webpage to gather information from researchers. This form will ask them, amongst other things, if they already have an ORCID iD and if so, what was there motivation for for getting one.

The webpage will contain information and instructions around registering for an iD via the ORCID website and then adding this into PURE 4.18.

Policy on the Publication of Research approved

Yippee! We've just heard that the University's Policy on the Publication of Research has been approved by Senate. This is really important to this project as the policy requires the use of author IDs and endorses ORCID for this purpose.

We want to stress the benefits of using ORCID to researchers but it is good to have the back-up that the policy provides.

Pure upgrade

We have now moved our live instance of Pure (Research Information System) to version 4.18.
V.4.18 has the ORCID functionality not present in earlier versions and necessary for completion of the ORCID project at York, so it's implementation is something of a relief. There was a potential cloud on the horizon as the connector that joins Pure to ePrints, and through which we populate our institutional repository, was not working as expected in the new instance of Pure. For a while there loomed the difficult decision between living without the connector or delaying the Pure upgrade but, thanks to the Pure support at Elsevier, the problem has now been resolved and Pure 4.18 is up and running, connector and all. 

Membership

University of York are now an ORCID member! We went for a Creator licence, Basic level membership.

Starting point

As of June 2014, there are 216 ORCID iDs registered using a University of York email address.
We have 1,248 academic and research staff so that's about 17%. If you include research students that drops to about 9%. Of course, other staff will have one as well (I do!).
So, plenty of work to do... 

ORCID project launch

May 2014 saw the beginning of the ORCID implementation project at York. The project is being led by the Information Directorate in collaboration with Research and Enterprise and is part of the Jisc/ARMA Pilot Project for ORCID implementation in UK HEIs.