Symplectic Elements integrates with ORCID

Being able to effectively and consistently link yourself to your research is not only convenient, but also vitally important if you want your work to be discovered.

Since its launch in October 2012, the ORCID registry has issued over 500,000 unique identifiers to help researchers and scholars keep track of their outputs and other “works”.

By the end of 2014, the ORCID team hope to triple this figure to 1.5 million ORCID ID’s and today Symplectic is pleased to announce its own contribution to this most important of causes by becoming one of the first ORCID members to use Authenticated ID’s to transfer data from the ORCID registry to an institutional information management system.

From today, all ORCID members who run Symplectic Elements v4.8 or above at their institution will be able to advise their researchers to link their Elements account with the ORCID registry in one single step; thereby liberating them from the often tedious re-entry of metadata; all thanks to the inherent benefits of linked unique persistent identifiers!

Secure integration

As part of their first ORCID integration, researchers are able to link their ORCID account with Elements. This has been achieved using OAuth – a secure verification protocol that will authorise Elements to access a researcher’s ORCID account. This access can be revoked at any time.

Configuring ORCID is really easy, simply click ‘configure’ next to the ORCID data source and you’ll be greeted with an authentication screen to either login or register with ORCID.

Once the accounts have been linked, Elements will periodically search ORCID for a researcher’s “works” containing a DOI, PubMed ID or Scopus ID. Using these identifiers, Elements will then collect trusted metadata from some of our other data sources including PubMed, Scopus and CrossRef and automatically associate this harvested data with a researcher’s Elements account. In keeping with Symplectic’s company philosophy, all “works” will be automatically marked as claimed and no manual intervention is required.

Ensuring high quality data

As the level of duplicates in ORCID is still quite high – check out their most popular feature request – Elements have opted to harvest only unique publication identifiers. This approach was taken to ensure that the quality of data contained in Elements remains high and so that any unnecessary verification of data imported from the ORCID registry is avoided. As more and more researchers incorporate ORCIDs within their day-to-day research practices, it is hoped that researchers who move to a new Elements subscribing institution in the future will only have to authenticate their ORCID account to transfer all information about their works. The team are really pleased with this integration and would encourage any UK client considering to apply for the recently advertised JISC and ARMA pilot projects to take a look at their integration and to get in touch if you want to know more about how it works … and why!