Wait, what’s my password again?!
The struggle is real when it comes to remembering login credentials for the myriad online accounts folks have these days. That’s where Single Sign-On (SSO) options come in handy, and we’re excited to announce that we’ve added ORCID SSO support across Scholastica products to provide a more convenient sign-in (and sign-up!) experience for users.
With the new ORCID SSO option:
- New users can sign up for Scholastica using their ORCID credentials and have ORCID pre-fill their account information as applicable.
- Existing users can connect their ORCID iD to their Scholastica account and then log in to Scholastica using their ORCID credentials.
Read on to learn more about this new feature and the benefits of ORCID participation for researchers and journals!
Why ORCID Single Sign-On?
First, if you’re unfamiliar with the term SSO, it’s an authentication method that allows users to access multiple software systems with a single set of login credentials, so they don’t have to remember separate usernames and passwords for them. In this case, the single login is the user’s ORCID account.
We chose to support ORCID SSO because ORCID is the most widely used and recognized persistent digital identifier (PID) for researchers and scholarly communication professionals.
ORCID iDs started as a tool to help disambiguate researchers with similar or identical names and to connect the works of people who changed their names (e.g., after marriage). Today, the benefits of ORCID have expanded, and it now serves as a:
- Portable scholar record: ORCID helps researchers and scholarly communication stakeholders showcase the full scope of their contributions by linking their publications, datasets, grants, peer-review activities, affiliations, and other professional activities in a single, persistent profile.
- Trust marker: Since ORCID records connect researchers’ affiliations, publications, funding, etc., a scholar’s ORCID iD makes it easier to verify their professional identity and contributions.
- Metadata enrichment tool: When ORCID iDs are added to the metadata of publications, it makes it easier to discover, track, and share that research across scholarly communication systems (and reduces room for data errors!).
All of these benefits are driving researchers to sign up for ORCID, so many will have ORCID credentials for SSO!
Quick Tip: Journals using Scholastica’s Peer Review System can also customize their submission form to require, or give authors the option, to input their ORCID iDs along with other PIDs to be included in the XML metadata Scholastica generates for submissions. Editors can then automatically import that metadata into Scholastica’s Production Service and/or OA Publishing Platform, so it flows downstream to final published articles (or export it where needed). All of this makes the scholarly record richer and more transparent, so there are many benefits to encouraging scholars to embrace ORCID!
How the new ORCID SSO feature works
Users can connect their Scholastica account to ORCID for SSO in a few ways:
- From their account settings (for those who already have a Scholastica account)
- When creating a new account from the sign-up page (ORCID data will be used to populate sign-up form fields as applicable to save the user time!)
- When creating a new account from a reviewer or editor invitation link
When users choose to implement ORCID SSO via any of the above methods, they’ll be taken to an ORCID login page to authorize the connection with Scholastica. Once done, they’ll be able to sign in to Scholastica with ORCID moving forward.
New users will still be required to create a login for their Scholastica account to ensure they have a backup login method if needed.
Ready to get started?
The new ORCID SSO option is available to all Scholastica users, and those signing up for new accounts, with no setup steps required on the part of publisher or journal customers and at no added cost.
We cover everything users need to know about registering a new account with ORCID and connecting existing Scholastica accounts to ORCID for SSO in this help guide.
Stay tuned for future Scholastica updates, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us — we’re here to help!
