On Thursday, May 7, 2020, the Academic Senate of the California State University (ASCSU) passed a resolution in support of ORCID for the California State University (CSU) system, which includes 23 campuses across California.
In the resolution, the ASCSU “strongly encourage[s] CSU faculty, students, and administrators—whether past, present, or future—to sign up for an ORCID iD and maintain a well-curated and well-integrated ORCID record,” and includes a recommendation which “strongly encourage[s] the Office of the Chancellor and campus Presidents to provide financial support for a CSU-wide and campus ORCID institutional memberships, make robust ORCID integration a procurement standard for software service providers whenever reasonable, commission a system-wide ORCID implementation task force, and commit significant staff development time to build customized ORCID integrations within and across the CSU system.”
This resolution is a significant show of support for ORCID, led by CSU Fullerton (an institutional member of the ORCID US Community) with significant leadership from Mark G. Bilby, Scholarly Communication Librarian, lecturer, and chair of the CSU Fullerton Academic Senate Library Committee, as well as Mark Stohs, professor and chair of the CSU Fullerton Academic Senate. Congratulations to these leaders and to the ASCSU for supporting ORCID with this exciting milestone resolution!
The following original announcement of the news appeared on May 7, 2020 on the Cal schol.com blog, run by Mark Bilby:
“The Academic Senate of the California State University (ASCSU) today passed resolution AS-3412-20/FA in robust support of ORCID. The vote was without dissent: 47 ayes, 0 nays, and 2 abstentions.
This resolution is one of the first of its kind in the world, with Rutgers and Stanford having previously passed similar resolutions. Today’s ASCSU vote represents the first ORCID resolution adopted by any university consortium.
Employing nearly 53,000 faculty and staff, and educating some 481,000 students each year, the California State University is the nation’s largest four-year public university system.
As the resolution highlights, ORCID is a nonprofit member organization and an ISO-based standard and registry that provides for the clear, unambiguous identification of researchers and our scholarly accomplishments.
Founded in 2012, ORCID has gained significant traction in recent years, now surpassing 8.5 million individual users with ORCID iDs and over 1,100 institutional members and growing. ORCID made headlines in 2019 when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they were building ORCID into their required grant proposal workflows to ensure the accuracy of information and automate the population of forms.
Nearly 90 major academic publishers require ORCID to identify their authors clearly and unambiguously across thousands of journals and other publications. Most major scholarly pre-print, publication and data repositories (e.g., arXiv, ChemrXiv, biorXiv, Dash, Figshare, SSRN, Zenodo, etc.) also use ORCID to identify researchers.
The ASCSU ORCID resolution got its start at CSU Fullerton in its Academic Senate Library Committee chaired by Mark G. Bilby (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0100-6634). Bilby wrote up the first version of the resolution, which the committee reviewed and unanimously passed. Following the advice of the Executive Committee, the Library Committee crafted and approved a simpler statement of endorsement for ORCID for the campus. In the Spring of 2019 this endorsement was co-signed by several administrators and five Academic Senate committees, including Faculty Affairs, FDC Board, Faculty Research Policy, and Information Technology.
In the Fall of 2019, Bilby freshly revised the resolution and coordinated with our Academic Senate Chair Mark Stohs (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2727-0441), who brought this revised resolution to the ASCSU Faculty Affairs Committee. This committee met on September 18 and December 13 to review the resolution. It was approved by committee and had its first reading in ASCSU plenary on January 24, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic prevented the resolution from coming up during the March 2020 plenary session. However, in today’s plenary session, Stohs spoke forcefully for the resolution, which passed quickly and without dissent.
Over the last year, CSU Fullerton and CSU Northridge have both become ORCID member institutions. It is hoped that this resolution will help bring about broader awareness, participation, and coordination across the California State University system.
Beyond the CSU, it is hoped that this resolution will inspire similar university resolutions as well as government and funder policies.
It should also spur software companies in the academic research, publishing, and funding space to prioritize ORCID authentication and bilateral data sharing in their development roadmaps.”