Meet the FREYA partners: ORCID
Many different organisations are involved in FREYA and in this blog post series we take a closer look at the partners and their work. This time you can read about ORCID.
What is the mission of your organisation?
ORCID is part of the wider digital infrastructure needed for researchers to share information on a global scale. We enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations by providing an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. Our vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected with all their contributions and affiliations, across disciplines, borders, and time.
Why are PIDs important (for your organisation)?
As an organization that provides persistent identifiers for individual researchers, PIDs are what we do! However, other PIDs are every bit as important to us as ORCID iDs. An iD alone has very little value; its power is harnessed when it’s connected to other PIDs — DOIs for publications, datasets, and more; organization IDs such as RORs for funders, universities, etc; RAIDs for research activities and projects; RRIDs for research resources; and more! We are especially keen on FAIR PIDs containing open provenance information..
What do you do in FREYA?
ORCID is a FREYA partner organization. Together with the other partners, we help support the project in achieving its goals. This includes attending FREYA partner meetings, drafting and reviewing project outputs, providing technical, policy and communications support, engaging with pilot applications and participating in and administering the PID Forum.
What would your perfect (PID) world look like?
In 2019, we shared our vision of a perfect PID world in a blog post entitled Mapping the PID Landscape. It’s a world where “open persistent identifiers can help simplify processes and enable the reuse of information.” But this can only happen if we use them properly, and that means everyone playing their part — funders, publishers, research institutions and the vendors that support them, as well as researchers themselves. There’s a nice example of our vision being achieved in the real world in this Connected Research blog. One researcher, connected to an institution, to the funding that has enabled their research, and to all of those connected to the outputs that communicate their research findings to the wider world. Imagine how much time would be saved, and how many errors eliminated and research collaborations enabled, if all ORCID iDs were connected in this way — ideally by their organizations.
More information
You can learn more on our website, register for an ORCID iD for free, and subscribe to our blog or follow us on Twitter (@ORCID_Org) to keep up with what we are up to!