Last spring, a broad group of UK higher education sector bodies, funders and professional associations signed a joint statement expressing their support for the ORCID initiative. Now, HESA has integrated ORCID identifiers into its Student Record, and Jisc have announced a pilot project to develop best practices for a potential UK-wide adoption of ORCID in higher education.
It goes without saying that funding is essential for research. Perhaps less well-recognized is that funding awards are an important component of a researcher’s record of contributions. ORCID now provides researchers the tools to link their ORCID iD to their funding awards. Together with efforts by funding organizations to integrate ORCID identifiers into grants application and post-award reporting workflows, these tools will support the claiming of existing and new funded awards. To facilitate linkages to existing funding, we have created a form with fields that are consistent with the CASRAI dictionary, and added the ÜberWizard grant search tool developed by ÜberResearch. To ensure that funding information is unambiguously linked to funding agencies, we leverage CrossRef's FundRef Registry of funding organizations. Funding organizations are increasingly calling for the use of ORCID and other persistent identifiers and research exchange standards in grants submissions and management processes. Funders in the US, EU, and Australia are working to integrate ORCID iDs into their workflows and metadata. In late 2013, the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), the national funder in Portugal, launched a project to "ORCIDify" its national research information systems.