ORCID Consortium

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an important part of the research digital infrastructure. It is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. More on ORCID.

At the request of the community, TENET acts as the lead organisation for a South African ORCID Consortium serving the higher education & research sector. This allows TENET to provide cost savings on ORCID membership and local integration support. More information on the TENET ORCID Consortium, including a list of current members.

What is ORCID?

If you're still trying to figure what ORCID is all about and why you might need it, here's a short video that explains it.

Joining the ORCID Consortium

Membership of the South African ORCID consortium is open to South African public universities, statutory research councils & other government research agencies, private higher educational institutions, funding agencies, and other non-profits supporting research and education.

Eligible organisations can join the South African ORCID consortium by completing and returning a membership application.

Note that, as a condition of TENET's tax registration, profit-making organisations (including private higher education institutions registered as for-profit companies) are specifically precluded from joining the Consortium. Such organisations are encouraged to join ORCID as a direct member instead.

TENET's ORCID Support

As the consortium lead organisation, TENET provides first-tier support for members making use of ORCID integrations. Member institutions looking for ORCID support should contact TENET's service desk .

We also offer the Intembeko ORCID Hub as a means to help smaller institutions gain maximum benefit of their ORCID membership without requiring the technical capabilities to do integrations.

ORCID Consortium Pricing

Membership of the South African ORCID consortium runs on an annual cycle from January-December. Where membership is taken up mid-cycle, a pro-rata amount is levied for the first cycle.

We invoice for ORCID membership a month or so after the anniversary date each year, and, in the interests of transparency, this has two separate components:

ORCID, Inc. offers Premium Consortium Membership at a reduced rate and TENET passes this cost on to South African consortium members directly in Rand.
We also levy a small consortium lead fee to cover the South African component. The exact amount of this varies depending on whether the consortium member takes up other services (we discount this for members who take up bundled NREN services).

More information is available on request.

ORCID Resources & Best Practices

A collection of useful links and resources to help you make the most of ORCID

ORCID has comprehensive information available on their website. What's below highlights some of the documentation that may be of particular interest to consortium members:

The Australian consortium operator, AAF, has developed a number of resources that may be useful:

Outreach and communication — examples of how to communicate with your users about ORCID
Greenhouse — open source software, installation guides and integration examples

Likewise, the UK consortium operator, JISC, has a dedicated support site.