The ORCID login and DSpace repositories

Why we applied to the ORCID Global Participation Fund.

ORCID is an essential service for us. It allows scholars to connect to their research results globally and across multiple services. And ORCID offers the option to seamlessly authenticate to many services in the context of research. This makes it possible to log in to a service that supports this with a central login, regardless of institutional affiliation.

DSpace is the open source software that powers the most publication repositories in the world. Over 3000 installations are listed in the registry. They are distributed over all continents. DSpace or the variant DSpace-CRIS is also used to operate TUHH Open Research for Open Access publication, research data and research information at the TU Hamburg.

So what could be more obvious than an ORCID login under DSpace?

This has actually been around for a long time in TORE with the DSpace CRIS variant. And in the meantime also in DSpace since version 7.3 from last year. But there can be constellations where this login does not work after all. Unfortunately, it is then hardly possible to explain the problem with helpful error messages.

The problem is actually not a problem but a good concept: ORCID gives each and everyone full sovereignty over the visibility for every single piece of information in their own ORCID record. And one piece of information that is not readily made available to the public is one’s own email address. So authentications that require access to the email address will fail if an external service is not allowed to access it.

So the other side – in this case DSpace – has to come up with a good and intuitive concept to allow users to share their email for login.

ORCID Login Project

At TU Hamburg, we have already initiated a lot for the ORCID connection for DSpace for TUHH Open Research. But this point was still missing on our implementation list. Therefore, we applied for the ORCID Global Participation Fund (GPF) in the area of Technical Integration with the project “ORCID Login improvement for DSpace-CRIS”. Fortunately, the application was successful in terms of a best practice solution for an ORCID integration, so hopefully by the end of 2023 we will be able to present a solution that should simplify the ORCID login for all DSpace(-CRIS) installations worldwide.

For the implementation we are supported by the company 4Science, who originally developed the ORCID integration under DSpace. We are looking forward to a productive project and are always open for suggestions or comments from the community.