In February 2024, ORCID announced the third round of Global Participation Fund recipients, including a proposal submitted by Lyrasis for improvements to ORCID functionality in DSpace. ORCID’s relatively new Global Participation Fund program, launched in 2022 as part of ORCID’s Global Participation Program, is designed to support equity of access to ORCID, improving the visibility of researchers and reducing administrative burden on both researchers and institutions around the world.
Since 2018, Lyrasis has served as the home of the ORCID US Community, a nationwide consortium for non-profit organizations that are members of ORCID, in partnership with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and the NorthEast Research Libraries (NERL). The ORCID US Community provides dedicated support and resources for the growing community of practice around ORCID in the United States. This includes helping US members get the most value from ORCID by integrating the ORCID member API with various software platforms (repositories, research information management systems, grant tracking systems, publishing systems and more), and working closely with counterparts around the globe to ensure ORCID adoption across the global research ecosystem. Lyrasis staff supporting the ORCID US Community program have become very familiar with the way that ORCID works for and benefits different stakeholders and software systems, as well as the challenges to ORCID adoption.
Lyrasis is also the organizational home for DSpace, a widely-used, community-supported, open source repository platform with users across the globe, including Latin America, Africa and other areas that are currently under-represented in the ORCID community. (Please see the list and map of organizations that have self-reported as using DSpace.) While the current version of DSpace already has an ORCID API integration that was certified by ORCID in 2022, the requirements for ORCID certification have changed, and additional work is needed to make sure DSpace continues to meet those requirements. The DSpace community-represented governance determines development priorities for the platform, and there are often multiple priorities that need to be addressed, either by volunteers or through funds raised within the community to hire contractors, which can take time. Over the course of working with ORCID members in the US and ORCID consortia leads in Canada, Ireland and South Africa, as well as other countries with many institutions using both ORCID and DSpace, a need was identified to more quickly bring DSpace up to speed with ORCID’s evolving certification requirements, for the benefit of researchers, repository administrators and the research landscape at large.
Thanks to ORCID’s Global Participation Fund program, the ORCID US Community team was able to submit a proposal and receive grant funding to specifically address and fix the priority issues related to ORCID in DSpace, to ensure that DSpace continues to meet the needs of ORCID members, prospective members and the ORCID certified service provider program. These improvements are expected to be implemented over the course of the 2024 calendar year; please stay tuned for more updates as we move forward with this project. For questions, please contact orcidus@lyrasis.org.