Bridging identity challenges: why and how one library plugged ORCiD into their enterprise

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation and impact of a locally customized Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCiD) profile wizard. It also provides a broader context for adopting ORCiD as an identity and single sign-on solution.

A custom web application was designed by a library team and implemented using a combination of the OAuth protocol and the ORCiD web services API. The tool leveraged a rich, curated set of local publication data, and exposed integration hooks that allowed other enterprise systems to connect ORCiD IDs with an internal employee identifier.

Initially the tool saw only modest use. Ultimately its success depended upon integration with other enterprise systems and the requirement of an ORCiD ID for internal funding requests, rather than exclusively on the merits of the tool. Since introduction, it has been used to generate over 1,660 ORCiDs from a population of 4,000 actively publishing researchers.

Organizations that desire to track publications by many affiliated authors would likely benefit from some sort of integration with ORCiD web services. This is particularly true for organizations that have many publishing researchers and/or track publications spanning many decades. Enterprise integration is crucial to the success of such a project.

Research inputs and research products are now primarily digital objects. So having a reliable system for associating researchers with their output is a big challenge that, if solved, could increase researcher impact and enhance digital scholarship. ORCiD IDs are a potential glue for many aspects of this problem. The design and implementation of the wizard eased and quickened adoption of ORCiD Ids by local researchers due in part to the ease with which a researcher can push publication information already held by the library to their profile. Subsequent integration of researcher ORCiD IDs with local enterprise systems has enabled real-time propagation of ORCiD IDs across research proposal workflow, publication review and content discovery systems.