Ongoing ORCID implementation within the pharmaceutical industry: an Open Pharma and GSK Vaccines initiative

Poster presented at the 2018 European Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals, 23–24 January 2018, London, UK

Objectives

In scientific publishing, name confusion of authors is common and can lead to wrongful accreditation of publications. ORCID provides a unique identifier, the ORCID identifier, which distinguishes researchers from each other, thus enabling fair accreditation and appropriate transparency around scholarly authorship. As a participant of Open Pharma, GSK Vaccines set out to assess the feasibility of implementing ORCID: company employees who qualified as authors were encouraged to register with ORCID, while the GSK Vaccines Publications team documented the number of registrations.

Methods

Informational materials were sent to all GSK Vaccines authors, who were asked to register with ORCID and to confirm their registration through DatavisionTM (Envision Pharma Group, Horsham, UK) from 14 August 2017 until the end of 2017. Authors were sent a monthly email to enquire about any challenges they faced, or any questions or comments they may have had during the ORCID registration process. Unsolicited feedback from registrants was also recorded.

Results

Within GSK Vaccines, 540 employed authors were contacted to take part in this pilot. Nine of the 540 authors were no longer employed by GSK Vaccines and therefore follow-up contact via email was not made.

Conclusions

The majority of GSK Vaccines authors adopted ORCID on request; GSK Vaccines will continue to encourage employed authors to register with and use ORCID. No significant hurdles were identified in this pilot study. From early 2018, external authors will be requested to register with ORCID and provide an ORCID identifier when working on GSK Vaccines publications. Further initiatives like the one described here and raising awareness may encourage adoption of ORCID by the pharmaceutical industry. Journals requiring ORCID identifiers may also facilitate widespread adoption of ORCID and support the integration of other initiatives such as CRediT (http://docs.casrai.org/ CRediT) and Convey (http://www.convey.org/).