The Department of Library Services (DLS) is assisting the faculties and Department of Research and Innovation (DRI) in the tracking, management and recording of the University’s research outputs. DRI also coordinates the consolidated annual submission all of UP’s research outputs to the Department and Higher Education and Training (DHET) – and this submission is the basis for the research subsidy we receive from DHET.

In order to elevate the profile of UP researchers; facilitate access to National Research Foundation (NRF) funding; and to assist in ensuring completeness and integrity of the research output data UP submits to DHET; UP has embarked on an initiative to establish ORCiD identities for all our researchers, and to encourage our researchers to reference their ORCiDs on all their publications.

This message is my request to all UP researchers to participate in this initiative by creating an ORCiD account for yourselves (if you have not already done so), as well as ‘authorising’ the UP system to access your ORCiD  account with limited rights. This authorisation will save you time and effort because it will allow UP in future to read, and potentially automate the updating of some of your data on the ORCiD system, and to reconcile this data with data in other UP research databases. Below is more detailed information on the technical process.

The process is as follows:

1. Register for an ORCiD (if you have not already done so), and
2. ‘Authorise’ UP to have limited rights to interact with data stored on your ORCiD record, and
3. Enable single sign-on via the UP portal

The user guide document to assist you with these processes can be downloaded from:

https://www1.up.ac.za/cs/gf/uppr458714

Should you have any questions about the process detailed in this user guide document, please contact Barry Hudson ([email protected]) on 012 420 4740.

I would appreciate your support on this initiative to keep UP at the forefront.

Kind regards

Stephanie Burton

What is an ORCiD?

An ORCiD provides a unique digital identifier that distinguishes one researcher from another. It supports automated linkages between a researcher and his/her professional activities thereby ensuring that all research is easily recognised. An ORCiD enables data such as the researcher’s employment history; education and qualifications; positions; distinctions; memberships; research funding; other researcher IDs; and “works” to be recorded – either by the researcher themselves or on their behalf by other “authorised” parties.     

What are the benefits for researchers?

The benefit for researchers of having, and managing, the completeness of their ORCiD account includes:

• All of the researcher’s publications, and “works” are linked to their ORCiD identity
• Researchers can elect to make their ORCiD profile publicly visible  
• ORCiD enables researchers to search for other ORCiD registered researchers via researcher names, institutions or subject keywords.
• Researchers can be ‘found’ by other parties using ORCiD search tools. 
• Linking your publications to an unchanging ORCiD identifier overcomes the challenges of your research record potentially referencing different surnames over time, or incomplete initials being cited on publications, or changes of your home institution.
• Grant funding from the National Research Foundation cannot be sourced without researchers providing their ORCiD.
• Interfaces provided by ORCiD will allow trusted third parties (in our case, allow the UP system to interface with the ORCiD suite) to update their ORCiD record on researchers’ behalf.

What are the benefits for UP?

The benefit for UP researchers ‘authorising’ UP to access components (with limited rights) of their ORCiD record is that this enables UP systems to use the software interfaces made available by the ORCiD suite to ‘authorised parties’ (viz. DLS) to view, extract and potentially update some of the data residing on UP staff members’ ORCiD records.  This would, for example:

• Enable UP to know which UP researchers have already registered an ORCiD record
• Enable UP to potentially extract the researcher’s outputs data from ORCiD and to compare this with the data captured in other UP systems (e.g. InfoEd’s Research Outputs) – and based on this comparison to either update the ORCiD record or update the Research Outputs systems with the missing data. This will save you time and effort in doing it yourself.
• Enable data from the ORCiD records (e.g. education; memberships) to potentially be extracted and replicated to the researcher’s CV in the PeopleSoft HCM suite.  This new functionality is visible under the ‘Talent Profile’ tile within the ‘Employee Self Service’ home page on the UP intranet.
• Enable data from other UP systems (e.g. if the researcher obtained additional degrees/qualifications via UP) to be pushed to your ORCiD record.

Why enable single sign-on from the UP portal?

Once you have registered for an ORCiD, you will be able to sign into your ORCiD account using your ORCiD username and password.  However, to simplify the process you can elect to enable a single sign-on to your ORCiD account via the UP portal by following the simple steps in the user guide. This will then enable you in future to log on to the UP portal, and select the ORCiD portlet within the portal, and you will be logged onto your ORCiD account without having to remember your ORCiD specific username and password – as the ORCiD suite will “trust” your UP portal credentials, thereby making accessing your ORCiD account in future a great deal simpler.