ORCID & GO FAIR US: Collaborators Working to Realize a FAIR Data Ecosystem
By now, you might have heard the latest buzz about the FAIR Data Principles that show up in so many places related to creating, managing, or supporting research data. Despite all the fuss, it’s not necessarily clear how to go about making the change in culture and practice that would enable research data to be FAIR.
The acronym (F-Findable A-Accessible I-Interoperable R-Reusable) sounds simple enough, but when you start looking more closely at what’s involved in implementing those principles in your part of the research data world, the tasks associated can be quite daunting. Fortunately, there are some data services available that can help you as a participant in the research data lifecycle to take on one of the most important tasks—assigning persistent identifiers to people and research “objects.” The ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) organization is one of those data services.
ORCID has recently become one of the most recognized and important international data service organizations to join GO FAIR US for the purposes of helping to improve both the ease of finding and sharing data and facilitating the interoperability of the research data infrastructure. The working relationship between the two organizations is the kind of collaboration and support that has been identified as critical to realize a “FAIR data ecosystem” for data service organizations.
What is a FAIR Data Ecosystem?
The FAIR Data Principles were coined in 2016 by a group of researchers concerned about the urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. Noting a general lack of recognition of the value of data, especially given the costs associated with their creation, dissemination and management, these researchers saw a low likelihood of data reuse by both humans and machines. Following this declaration of FAIR principles, an important report and action plan was published in 2018 by the European Commission entitled Turning FAIR Into Reality, aka, the TFiR report. It analyzed the feasibility of implementing these FAIR data principles and made recommendations about how implementation could be improved (TFiR Report).
One of the key concepts included in the TFiR report was a thoughtful description of the technical ecosystem necessary for achieving FAIR data. The TFiR report describes the notion that FAIR digital objects exist in a wider “FAIR ecosystem comprising services and infrastructures for FAIR.” (pg 12) The layers that are part of the technical infrastructure of the FAIR ecosystem include 1) applications and tools that can help people reuse data (among other tasks), 2) repositories and registries, and 3) core technical infrastructures. PID providers for FAIR digital objects, researchers, organizations and funders are critical data service providers from this perspective. (pg 39)
Recommendations for Services to support a FAIR Data Ecosystem
While the TFiR Report covers a great deal of ground in terms of helping data service providers create and/or improve their support of realizing a FAIR ecosystem, a subsequent paper offers more specific recommendations to both data and infrastructure service providers. Those most pertinent to the work of both ORCID and GO FAIR US relate to 1) making use of essential infrastructure components like PID services, 2) supporting data stewardship, and 3) fostering and supporting cross-institutional collaboration.
ORCID
ORCID’s key contribution to the FAIR Data Principles is providing a persistent identifier for researchers (an ORCID iD). This a 16-digit number distinguishes one researcher from others across all disciplines and around the world, which is particularly important for researchers with a common name. When researchers register for an ORCID iD, they are assigned an ORCID record to populate with their professional activities, like employment, education, grants, publications, peer review, and more. Researchers can then share their ORCID iD in a number of workflows, such as manuscript submission or grant applications with external organizations including publishers, funders, and employers. This enables researchers to connect their records with those systems and activate the automated data exchange between their records and those systems, as well as between other systems in the research ecosystem. This way, researchers get credit and recognition for all of their contributions to the research community. This also saves researchers a significant amount of time and reduces both their administrative burden, and the risk of errors inherent in manual data entry.
Interoperability Built-in to the PID Service Provider Infrastructure
One of the areas in which ORCID excels in helping to realize a FAIR data ecosystem as part of its core service offering is its emphasis on collecting and exchanging as many PIDs as possible through APIs, both Public (free) and Member (fee-based). Interoperability between infrastructure systems is enabled by providing these APIs so other stakeholders can exchange data between an ORCID record and their system, such as a publication, funding management, employee management or repository system. Citations for publication and funding awards can be written to ORCID records; the researcher is then notified by ORCID that a new data entry has been added to their record. In this manner, ORCID centers the researcher at the core of a research ecosystem. ORCID includes the persistent identifiers from these stakeholders in the rich metadata researchers can add to their ORCID records — or researchers can approve organizations to add metadata on their behalf. Researchers are always in full control of their record and can delete or edit the level of visibility for each line item in their record. As part of the ORCID record for a researcher you can find PIDs such as:
ROR IDs for organizations, like universities, publishers and funders
DOIs for digital objects like articles and datasets
Grant IDs for funding awards
RRIDs for research resources
RAiD iD for research projects
The list of persistent identifiers continues to evolve and settle as digital research ecosystems grow and mature. In order to make this interoperability happen as part of their core service, ORCID works with a number of stakeholder institutions to push information about those with ORCID IDs back to their records in ORCID. The image below gives you an idea of the kind of institutional stakeholders with which ORCID works.
As of January 2023, ORCID has engaged with nearly 1,300 (and growing) institutional stakeholder members that have pushed affiliation information within their systems to the ORCID records for researchers and research contributors who have signed up for ORCIDs. (See Table 1.) The push of affiliation data is done at no cost to the researcher; ORCID institutional members pay for the linking of the association of research data objects that ORCID provides. As long as the researcher signs into the institutional members’ systems and notes them as trusted, updating the researcher’s ORCID record requires substantially less effort on the part of the researcher. Not only is this service a boon to researchers, the working relationships among institutional members are key to the cross-institutional collaboration recommended by FAIR experts.
Table 1: Researcher Affiliation Information Contributed to ORCID-registered Researchers
Providing Collaboration and Support
Another area in which both ORCID and GO FAIR US put considerable effort is helping to develop and advance communities of practice related to implementation of the FAIR Principles. ORCID keeps track of a number of relevant data policies from organizations at many levels including US Federal and international agencies, and uses that knowledge to support their researchers and institutional members. The knowledge comes into play with ORCID’s contributions to the various working groups and communities of practice to which they belong such as the ORCID US Community Consortium, hosted by Lyrasis. The latter is an opportunity for representatives from US institutions to meet and discuss data policy and practical topics related to the use of ORCIDs.
GO FAIR US efforts to provide collaboration and support in realizing a FAIR data ecosystem also include working to develop a community of practice for researchers and their supporter specialists. Since the initial seed activities for GO FAIR US, which included an in-person workshop offered in 2019 to librarians, data curators and data managers who were interested in knowing more about FAIR and what it could mean for the researchers with whom they interact and support, GO FAIR US has been emphasizing education and training activities for both data “stewards” and researchers. In addition, GO FAIR US has been acting as a coordinating office to help adapt GO FAIR approaches to US research environments, and to investigate and inform our partners about emerging issues and solutions to FAIR implementation. Recent education and training webinars have included topics related to data governance and offered in collaboration with the Data Curation Network at the National Institutes of Health Office of Data Science Strategy, FAIR for artificial intelligence in Geoscience, and ORCID’s role in the FAIR data ecosystem. GO FAIR US is always looking for FAIR-experienced collaborators to partner with us on education and training events, tools and other activities by becoming partners as ORCID and other organizations have done. You can find more information about the benefits of joining GO FAIR US as a partner and/or sign up to become a partner at https://forms.gle/CFYZL7jTSSpzpU9t8.
GO FAIR US, in conjunction with EarthCube has also been quite involved in identifying and supporting research communities in the process of developing metadata standards for their research data, specifically, domain-specific ontologies. Of particular focus are those communities interested and ready to make more machine actionable the metadata creation and maintenance processes that are based on the community’s metadata standards and ontologies. These efforts have resulted in our offering a pilot Metadata for Machines (M4M) workshop that will serve as a model for future M4M workshops based on lessons learned that are included in a final report. We are also interested in developing workshops for more mature FAIR-enabled communities to share their contributions to a FAIR data ecosystem as FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs). Both of these approaches use methodologies from the GO FAIR Foundation’s Three Point Framework adapted to US research communities.
A new and exciting area of FAIR education, training, and implementation in which GO FAIR US is involved is supporting the use of artificial intelligence, especially for data reproducibility thanks to an award received from the National Science Foundation to establish a Research Coordination Network on this topic. There will undoubtedly be more information about this topic in the near future!
Sharing the Journey
Both ORCID and GO FAIR US are very interested in identifying and sharing stories of the progress (even if it has been a bumpy road!) toward the realization of a FAIR data ecosystem. Stories of success or failure, and the dissemination of information about emerging tools, workflows or other practices in the venues available to each organization have the promise of inspiring others. We know the value of FAIR implementation stories not only from our own experiences, but also from the recommendation by FAIR experts who are all working to facilitate and improve the finding, accessing, systems infrastructure interoperability and reusing of important research data. We’d love to hear from you! Message us at info@gofair.us or on Twitter @gofairus.
For further reading about how ORCID supports the FAIR principles, you can check out our blog from July 2022: ORCID: Keeping Up with FAIR Momentum. You can also view slides and videos from past and future GO FAIR US webinars.