A Message on ACLS Use of ORCiD
“What on earth is an ORCiD and why do I need one to apply for an ACLS fellowship?”
Since ACLS began requiring applicants for many of our competitions to include one of these persistent identifiers (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), this has been a common question. As administrators of more than $25 million in fellowship and grant awards each year, we are the last ones to want to make our application process more elaborate. But this simple step helps circulate humanistic knowledge and helps scholars get credit for the fuller range of work they do for their fields.
When it comes to hiring and promoting faculty members, colleges and universities are very good at counting a scholar’s published articles and books. Yet too much of the work of humanistic scholars is invisible when it comes time to assess advancement in the profession: we all know that meaningful methods for evaluating teaching have long been elusive. Time spent by a faculty member to establish a trusted relationship with a community partner or managing a team: invisible. Time spent assembling and coding data from oral histories or making sense of unexamined archives from a previously understudied community: invisible. Being one of the handful of faculty in the country in a position to provide peer review or a tenure letter to the next generation of scholars working with new methods or in emerging fields: invisible.
To make the invisible visible, we need to speak the language of metrics. This means engaging humanistic scholars and fields in the systems that have been created and supported by the publishing ecosystem. Standards have been created in the enterprise of medical and scientific publishing for identifying individual researchers and their roles in projects; one of the best-known, ORCiD, is supported by a non-profit organization whose mission is “to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations.”
To make the invisible visible, we need to speak the language of metrics. This means engaging humanistic scholars and fields in the systems that have been created and supported by the publishing ecosystem.
When a person creates an ORCiD, the system creates a record of the Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) of their publications and a list of their professional roles and accomplishments. These IDs include attributes similar to Curriculum Vitae and LinkedIn profiles. While they are widely used in the sciences, they have not been taken up in many corners of the humanities and social sciences.
ACLS has signed on as an ORCiD partner and will begin adding our validated record of ACLS fellowship awards into the system in the coming months. Our doing so ensures that our peer-reviewed awards are recorded in the portfolios of the awardees. Further, we anticipate ORCiD will become a locus for capturing scholars’ significant contributions to other aspects of academic work and the work of ACLS member societies—volunteer leadership roles, editorial positions, and the committee service—that is essential to our scholarly ecosystem. As ORCiD gains traction among our applicants, we should be able to make the work of applying for fellowships and grants faster and easier by importing significant parts of an applicant’s materials from the applicant’s ORCiD itself. In addition, ORCiD is valuable in tracking individuals more consistently across a variety of circumstances, such as when scholars publish under names with Chinese, Arabic, and other non-Roman alphabet characters or one change their name or legal identity.
Making the invisible visible begins with an essentially humanistic act—engaging with the world through a language that it understands. While the extra step might seem bothersome now, we appreciate your collaboration in an undertaking that will, over the longer term, help to support and reward the efforts of all those who contribute to our enterprise.