TENET is proud to announce the launch of the Intembeko ORCID Hub built to help the members of the South African ORCID Consortium reap the full benefits of ORCID. Many South African researchers already have an ORCID iD, as the National Research Foundation (NRF) and some publishers and funders require this. But a number of local institutions have been battling with the technical integrations to allow them to populate their researchers’ ORCID records on their behalf and to use the ORCID records for their institution’s own reporting purposes.
The Intembeko ORCID Hub, inspired by the New Zealand ORCID Hub, offers the South African Consortium members the necessary platform to allow them to use a set of ORCID member application programming interface (API) credentials to interact with the ORCID registry irrespective of their organisation’s technical capabilities. Intembeko means “trust” in isiXhosa and symbolises the intention of the Hub to act as a trusted source of information for ORCID records.
ORCID, a global not-for-profit organisation created by researchers, was developed to solve the problem of accurately linking research publications, data and other research outputs to the right researcher. This is done through the creation of a persistent digital identifier, an ORCID iD, attached to an individual researcher which they maintain throughout their career, irrespective of name and institution changes. Globally and locally the ORCID iD has become the standard research identifier used by funders, publishers, government and institutions.
An ORCID iD provides a range of benefits across the research ecosystem, including the ability to track researchers through name, institutional affiliation, and other changes. It also avoids mix-ups with researchers of the same name. Institutions can populate the ORCID records of their affiliated researchers. Not only does this reduce the administrative burden on researchers, it also allows the institution to efficiently gather accurate data about their researchers’ publications for reporting purposes. But in order to reap the full benefits of ORCID institutions need the technical know-how to build applications to connect to ORCID. This is what the Intembeko ORCID Hub does for institutions. It allows all South African ORCID Consortium members to make authoritative assertions concerning their relationship with researchers on the researcher's ORCID record, irrespective of their size or in-house capacity to integrate with ORCID.
Using the Intembeko ORCID Hub
The Hub works in conjunction with the South African Identity Federation (SAFIRE), the national academic identity federation for the South African research and higher education community, to ensure that login is both secure and easy, using trusted institutional credentials.
Intembeko allows for both a researcher and institutional administrator to log in. An institution’s staff and students can use the Hub to give permission to their institution to access their ORCID records. The value of this access to the researcher is that the institute can populate their ORCID record on the researcher's behalf. A researcher can also create their ORCID iD through the Intembeko ORCID Hub. Once a researcher has given this permission, their institution(s) can then use the Hub to fill the researcher’s ORCID record based employment, education and the publication data held by the institution for that researcher. This also allows the institution to draw from their researchers’ ORCID records for reporting and other records.
Beyond the launch of Intembeko
As with all TENET’s offerings, the Intembeko ORCID Hub is, and will be, developed in response to the needs of our partner institutions. The Intembeko ORCID Hub has been built in a way that allows the platform to be customised in future according to the needs of the institutions within the Consortium.
