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.

The 'Big Five-O'

Over 50% of York researchers now have an ORCID iD recorded in Pure! It's taken about 4 1/2 months since launching the campaign in earnest (136 days, to be exact) but all-in-all that's not too bad.

York ORCID Project at OAI9

Back in June, Thom Blake presented a poster about the York ORCID Project at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications (OAI9) in Geneva.

The poster can be downloaded from White Rose Research Online: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/87739

ORCID mug prize draw winner!

In our second prize draw a fantastic customised ORCID mug was won by Judith Winters from Internet Archaeology. Congratulations to Judith and we hope she is happy with her new mug.

But don't worry, there is still time to enter our next draw for an customised ORCID mug. Just complete our online survey at www.york.ac.uk/orcid/

ORCID and York at DigiFest 2015 and UKSG 2015

Back on the 9th March, Janette Colclough from the York ORCID project joined Verena Weigert from Jisc to give an update on the project to attendees at the Jisc Digital Festival 2015. The presentation from the event is available from the Jisc website (Hint: under "Uncovering research - what's the standard?").

But don't worry if you couldn't make DigiFest; Janette will be giving further updates on the projects at York and the other participating UK institutions at the UKSG 38th Annual Conference in Glasgow, on 31st March and 1st April. The session will be repeated twice as part of breakout group C, under the title "Distinguishing ourselves: experiences of ORCID iD implementation and the Jisc-ARMA pilot".

The 'Big Five-OO'

This week we reached over 500 ORCID iDs in Pure!
It's a fairly arbitrary target, but everyone likes a round number. It also happens to work out at almost exactly 35% of our academic and research staff population - not quite as round a number but none-the-less an admirable target in it's own right.

Disaster averted

At the start of the year ORCID announced the new version of their API. For reasons clearly articulated on a recent post on the ORCID blog, ORCID made the decision to not actively support older versions of the API after their 'sunset date'. This change of API has caused some agitation at our end. As our implementation of ORCID is very much based around our CRIS - Pure - making sure that this continues to work effectively with the API is essential for the smooth running of our project. For a while it looked like we might have to go a period of time in which we couldn't generate ORCID iDs through Pure, or even add existing iDs to Pure. Experience shows that it doesn't take much disruption in service to undo a lot of good work in promoting that service in the first place.
Responding to a change in API is not an easy business when using a large and 'business-critical' system like Pure. Atira - the developers of Pure - have to make the necessary changes for their next version release, putting it into an already busy update schedule. Once this new update is launched it needs to be installed on our test servers and tested before we can make it live. A system like Pure has a number of modules used by many different people in different ways for different purposes, many of which are critical, so testing has to be thorough and the system can't be made live until we are absolutely sure that there will be no nasty surprises. In short, the process can't be rushed and there is no way that we will have the next release of Pure (4.21.0) live by the time active support for the older ORCID API ceases. 
But, thanks have to go to Atira who have come to our rescue by launching an intermediate release of Pure (4.20.X) which uses the updated ORCID API but which we can implement without the extensive testing needed when implementing a whole new release. The changeover hasn't happened quite yet but from the testing we've done it looks like the ORCID functionality will continue seamlessly without the users noticing any change. Panic over. Relax.