Investigating unclaimed ORCID iDs

There is a potential in the current workflow used by Pure for ORCID iDs to be created but not subsequently claimed by the researcher. The ORCID account is created when the user clicks on the  Create ORCID iD option in Pure. The researcher then needs to follow the unique link in the subsequent email to claim their iD.

After some very helpful exchanges with ORCID support, we decided that we should investigate the number of unclaimed iDs at York. Our technical expert, Julie Allison, used the ORCID API to produce a list of unclaimed iDs. This identified 49 unclaimed iDs. This represented 7% of the total at the time of running the report (back in June 2015).

The list of unclaimed iDs was cross-referenced to identify researchers' email addresses and departments. The department was relevant as we wanted to see if there was any pattern in the distribution of unclaimed iDs. We found that the majority of unclaimed iDs came from departments where the research administrators had clicked on the Create ORCID iD option in Pure on behalf of their researchers rather than the researcher doing it themselves. This is interesting when we are thinking about effective routes to ORCID implementation.

Having identified the unclaimed iDs, we then used the appropriate ORCID web page to resend the claim email. We will monitor the success of this, and check for "new" unclaimed iDs, by using the ORCID API again later in the year.