ANALYSIS AND NEWS
implementation. The pilot projects have demonstrated that ORCID can be successfully implemented in institutional systems within a period of six to nine months, at an average cost of £12,500 – most of which relates to the cost of time spent by existing staff members. The incremental cost to the pilot institutions of adopting ORCID was found to be minimal, being limited to the annual cost of ORCID membership, and a small amount of travel and promotional costs. We estimate that it would cost the UK HE sector £2.1m over the next five years to progressively implement ORCID at 120 institutions (roughly equivalent to the number of institutions that made submissions to the 2014 REF).
While the benefits of ORCID are difficult to quantify so soon in the process, feedback from the pilot shows that universities expect to see measurable efficiency improvements, especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management and enhanced reporting to funders approximately two years from implementation, with benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years. These improvements would need to deliver a saving of only 15 minutes per researcher and
10 per cent of an administrative staff member per institution, per year, in order to recoup the investment of £2.1m by 2020, which the pilot institutions considered to be eminently achievable. It’s also very important to emphasise that ORCID enables a wide range of fundamental improvements to the scholarly communications ecosystem.
While the pilot work did not attempt to attribute a financial value to these, many
‘All plan to continue to encourage their researchers to use ORCID identifiers’
stakeholders consulted saw these as more important than administrative efficiencies. At the same time, momentum is building
and ORCID identifiers are increasingly being requested both during publishing and when researchers are applying for grants. The Wellcome Trust, for example will require lead applicants for funds to provide an ORCID identifier when submitting a grant application from August 2015. To make ORCID as cost-effective as
possible for universities and to enable and encourage implementation by funders in their systems and processes, Jisc is about to launch a UK-wide ORCID consortium membership to enable participating HEIs to benefit from significantly lower ORCID membership costs and from an enhanced level of technical support. This support will be dedicated to accelerating the speed with which universities can get on board with ORCID and this should also help to minimise the learning curve. It is only when ORCID identifiers are seen as a key element of a researcher’s toolkit (and institutional, publisher and funder systems must embed the identifiers and connect with the ORCID registry) that we will truly reap the benefits of this approach. The Jisc- ARMA pilot project and the UK consortium that came out of it are key staging posts on the journey towards more effective and efficient research systems, delivering future savings and benefits for universities and their researchers across the UK and beyond.
Verena Weigert is senior technology manager at Jisc; Rob Johnson is the founder of Research Consulting Related internet links
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