PKP is very pleased to announce it has become a member of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). ORCID has been instrumental in advancing the concept of a persistent digital identifier that uniquely distinguishes an author or researcher from everyone else. Name disambiguation is a critical requirement for all aspects of scholarly publishing and communication starting with the initial subscription of a manuscript for publication and subsequently for ongoing discovery and accessibility purposes. ORCID’s unique identifier can be used by researchers to clearly identify their works and provide a standard linkage with other systems and services.



Alice Meadows, ORCID’s Director of Community Engagement & Support said: “We are very excited about working with PKP so that OJS journals, along with their authors and readers, can realize the benefits of incorporating ORCID IDs at so many points within the lifecycle of a published scholarly article. We look forward to an ongoing collaborative relationship with PKP.”

PKP and a growing number of OJS journals have been tracking the development and uptake of ORCID IDs during the past few years. Since the release of OJS 2.4.5 in September 2014, ORCID IDs have been included in Crossref deposits originating from OJS journals. This is important because it allows OJS journals to take advantage of ORCID’s Auto-Update feature, ensuring ORCID records stay up-to-date. Further ORCID integration with OJS was one of the development tasks undertaken at PKP’s Spring 2016 Sprint held in Montreal. As a result, there is now a direct link to the ORCID sign-in button built in the OJS User Registration form that supports the automatic population of the form with data from the user’s ORCID account. Similarly, OJS users can also associate their ORCID ID with an existing user profile.

Current ORCID support has also been ported to the upcoming OJS 3.0 — a major and very new version of OJS that PKP will release on August 31, 2016. Here’s a quick demonstration of how ORCID works in OJS 3 (click image to activate):

So far, all of the OJS integration work has been done using ORCID’s public APIs. Through PKP’s ORCID membership, we will now be able to work with their full range of member APIs and identify options for more extensive interoperability between the two systems. Although this will enable more ORCID functionality in OJS, it is important to note that individual journals and researchers still have to register and participate directly in ORCID if they want to realize the full potential of these unique ORCID identifiers.

Brian Owen, PKP’s Managing Director stated: “Persistent IDS like ORCID IDs and Crossref DOIs are playing an increasingly significant role in linking users and content, and providing integrated seamless access to them. PKP is committed to ensuring that OJS supports these new and critical components of scholarly publishing.”