Members receive access to the Member API, which facilitates registration, and information exchange with ORCID records. The API is a restful API and supports both XML and JSON. With the member API, organizations with permission from their researchers can add affiliations, funding, works, peer review, research resources and biographical data to ORCID records as well as being able to request access from a record holder to their trusted party record data.
In addition to all public API functions, the member API can be used to:
Access trusted data
Member organizations can use the member API to request and obtain permission to read trusted data on their researchers ORCID records.
The organization can ask researchers to grant them specific permission to read limited-access information at the same time that they request permission to collect ORCID iD’s. Once the researcher has granted permission, the trusted organization will be able to use the member API to read the ORCID record and read information that the researcher has set as visible to trusted parties in addition to the information set as visible to everyone.
Write data to ORCID records
You can help make life easier for your users by connecting validated information to their ORCID records. You will also be helping to build trust in scholarly communications and, by keeping that data up to date, you can reduce the reporting burden for your users and improve data quality.
For more information please see our API tutorial on how to write to ORCID records.
Sync ORCID records and your own system
Updating your researchers’ data within your system, to reflect changes in their ORCID record helps reduce the reporting burden for your researchers and improves data quality.
Webhooks change notifications are an ORCID premium member feature that enable applications to be informed when data within an ORCID record changes. This feature allows premium members to stay up-to-date with new or updated information, or even trigger events in their own systems based on an activity.
We strongly recommend that basic members also keep their system in sync too. This is possible by reading the ORCID records that you would like to track for the last updated date. If you store this date within your own system against the relevant ORCID iD then you can easily know if an ORCID record has been updated. If the date has changed then a simple call to read the entire record can be completed.
See our Synchronising with ORCID integration guide for more details