The Irish ORCID Consortium

ORCID® provides a unique persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that distinguishes researchers and a record that supports automatic links among all professional activities. The ORCID iD and connections are stored in the ORCID Registry, in an account the researcher owns and manages. Consortia membership is the premium level of membership and includes the following benefits: 5 ORCID premium member API credentials;the ability to read/write to the profiles of researchers (with permission);monthly analytics reports with personalised statistics from ORCID ensuring more complete reporting of research outputs;dedicated technical and community support.

Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights

The international Research Data Rights Summit was held at Sorbonne University on Monday, 27 January. This initiative brought together nine major networks of research-intensive universities from major regions of the world. It was an opportunity to sign the "Sorbonne Declaration" on the rights of research data. This text strongly affirms the willingness of universities to share their data while firmly calling on governments to adopt a clear legal framework to regulate this sharing and to provide the means to put it in place. Full text of the declaration here.

IREL and Covid-19

IReL’s (Irish Research e Library) office, based in Maynooth University, has closed, but its staff are continuing to work remotely. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of IReL’s partner publishers and vendors are supporting researchers and students by making content freely available during the crisis. They are typically doing this by either: removing paywall restrictions on COVID-19 related removing paywall restrictions on COVID-19 related research materials, or removing limits of the numbers of concurrent users for eBooks to cope with demand by students as they have moved to remote learning at short notice. An actively updated list of the resources being made available has been compiled by our peers among ICOLC (International Coalition of Library Consortia) members and can be viewed here.