Enhancing Interoperability in ORCiD Integrations and Faculty Reporting Systems, SUNYLA 2025

The adoption of ORCID iDs has revolutionized scholarly identity management, but creating complete, reliable profiles remains a challenge. At George Washington University (GWU), the transition from the legacy faculty reporting system Lyterati to Symplectic Elements offered an opportunity to streamline workflows, address data inconsistencies, and enhance system interoperability. Leveraging APIs—including OpenAlex, ORCID, and Symplectic Elements—the Libraries and Academic Innovation (LAI) team collaborated with Faculty Affairs to preserve legacy data, improve data quality, and automate key processes, aligning with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. Lyterati, the legacy system, relied heavily on manual data entry, leading to incomplete, inconsistent records. However, it also contained valuable data about scholarly activities without persistent identifiers, such as conference presentations and mentorships. Elements offered the advantage of standardized metadata through identifiers like DOIs but initially lacked functionality for handling rich historical data. The prospect of losing these records—or re-entering them manually—highlighted the need for innovative solutions. The team tackled this challenge with a multi-step approach: Legacy Data Cleanup: Using custom tools, we extracted and standardized key metadata from Lyterati, ensuring its compatibility with Elements. Author Parsing Tool: We developed a parser to resolve complex co-author strings, identifying individual contributors. OpenAlex Integration: By leveraging the OpenAlex API, we matched author metadata with ORCID profiles to enhance accuracy. Automated ORCID Claims: Faculty ORCID profiles were programmatically claimed within Elements, ensuring seamless integration. Expanded Data Imports: Activities and works without DOIs were imported into Elements, preserving the university’s academic history while reducing faculty workload. These efforts enabled Elements to function as a comprehensive repository of scholarly contributions, bridging gaps between legacy and modern systems. The curated dataset has the potential to significantly increase research visibility by identifying open-access works, preprints, and conference papers for future ingestion into our institutional repository. Moving forward, our next goal is to extend Elements-to-ORCID integration. Current workflows support only publications; we aim to enable seamless synchronization of comprehensive faculty profiles—including professional activities, grants, and profile information—with ORCID. This advancement supports FAIR principles, simplifies grant applications via platforms like SciENcv, and ensures robust, discoverable profiles that reflect the breadth of scholarly activity. This case study illustrates how libraries can lead in enhancing interoperability through innovative API use, system adaptation, and collaborative problem-solving. By addressing system limitations, we improved data quality, streamlined workflows, and preserved a rich academic record. These efforts demonstrate how aligning systems with open science practices can create resilient, transparent, and accessible data infrastructures that empower both researchers and institutions.