CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: NSF

  • Funder ORCID iD requirements: 2026 landscape

    The trajectory of ORCID iD requirements across major funders has been steady through 2018-2025: voluntary for PIs, recommended for PIs, required for PIs, and now in 2026 increasingly required for co-investigators and other named project personnel. This post is a practical map of the requirements as they stand in mid-2026, with attention to the operational implications for institutions handling cross-funder applications.

    The PI requirement

    For principal investigators, ORCID iDs are now effectively required across the major Western funders. UKRI requires the PI’s ORCID iD at application; the seven research councils’ submission system pre-fills bibliographic data from the ORCID record where available. The Wellcome Trust, the major UK charities, and the major European national funders (DFG, ANR, NWO, the Swiss SNSF, the Spanish AEI) have similar requirements.

    The US federal funders have moved more cautiously. NIH requires ORCID iDs in the biosketch via the SciENcv tool; NSF requires ORCID iDs for personnel in current-and-pending support; DOE, DOD, NASA, USDA have varying requirements with a convergent direction. The 2025 update to the Common Forms work standardised the ORCID requirement across federal-funder personnel forms, with the binding date in 2026.

    EU funding (Horizon Europe, ERC) requires ORCID iDs for PIs and an increasingly complete coverage of co-investigators. The Funding & Tenders Portal integrates with ORCID for bibliographic data retrieval.

    For PIs, the practical posture is that an ORCID iD is now table stakes. The CASRAI funder applicant guide tracks the per-funder requirements.

    The co-investigator expansion

    The 2026 development is the expansion of ORCID requirements to co-investigators and other named project personnel.

    UKRI’s 2025-2026 transition expanded the ORCID requirement to all named investigators on an application. The Funding Service expects ORCID iDs for everyone listed.

    NIH’s pilot to require ORCID iDs for all senior/key personnel began in 2025 and is now standard practice. Co-investigators without ORCID iDs cannot be listed.

    The EU Horizon Europe expansion is in progress, with the Funding & Tenders Portal expected to require ORCID iDs for all consortium personnel by end-2026.

    For institutions, this means the ORCID-iD adoption work that previously focused on PIs now needs to cover the entire research staff. Most research-intensive universities are at or near saturation for PIs; the broader staff coverage is lower and the expansion requires sustained adoption work.

    The structured-data side

    The funder ORCID requirements are about more than identifier collection. The funders increasingly consume structured data from ORCID at application time and write structured data back at award time.

    At application: funders pull biographical sketches, affiliation history, prior funding, and publication lists from ORCID. The applicant’s ORCID record becomes the source-of-truth for these data; the funder’s application system displays them with allow-edit-but-prefer-ORCID semantics. This is a substantial UX improvement over the previous pattern of researchers re-typing their bibliographic data into each funder’s system.

    At award: funders write the award itself to ORCID as a funding-record entry, and increasingly the project as a RAiD reference. The researcher’s ORCID record accumulates a complete funding history without manual entry.

    The ORCID 4.0 contribution model (discussed in our earlier post on the IDR roadmap) is the underlying schema that supports this. Funders that have implemented the 4.0 deposit patterns can write rich structured data; funders still on 3.x produce thinner records.

    Operational implications for institutions

    Three operational priorities for research-administration offices.

    First, institutional ORCID-iD coverage. Run a coverage audit: what fraction of your research staff have ORCID iDs, and are those iDs current and verified? Where coverage is incomplete, run an institutional ORCID-iD adoption campaign. Many institutions have done this for PIs and need to extend it to early-career researchers, postdocs, and research-staff categories that were previously deprioritised.

    Second, ORCID-integration in CRIS. Your CRIS should be reading from and writing to ORCID for affiliated researchers. The CRIS-ORCID integration patterns are well-documented; the CASRAI CRIS integration guide walks through them per major CRIS vendor. The integration removes substantial duplicate-data-entry burden from researchers.

    Third, application-support workflow. Your application-support workflow should be ORCID-anchored: the researcher’s ORCID record is the source for biographical data; the application’s data-entry tools should pull from ORCID by default; any application-specific data should be entered once and propagated to ORCID where appropriate.

    The edge cases

    Three edge cases deserve flagging.

    First, researchers without ORCID iDs. As funder requirements tighten, researchers without iDs become unable to apply. The case is straightforward to resolve (registration takes minutes) but the institutional support to ensure no researcher is blocked at application time is non-trivial.

    Second, researchers with duplicate or fragmented ORCID records. Some researchers have multiple ORCID iDs from different registration events; some have records that are out of date or incomplete. The ORCID record merge process and the institutional support for record cleanup are not always smooth. Institutional ORCID-administrator workflows should handle these cases.

    Third, international researchers. ORCID is a global infrastructure but adoption varies by country and discipline. International collaborators on a US- or EU-funded project may not have ORCID iDs; the application workflow needs to accommodate getting them registered. Many institutions have built bridge-support for this scenario.

    The 2027 trajectory

    Looking forward, the trajectory through 2027 is clear. ORCID iDs will be required not just for personnel but for funded outputs (publications, datasets, software) at the deposit step. The funder’s compliance tracking will run on the ORCID-anchored graph: did the awarded researcher produce the outputs they committed to, were the outputs FAIR-compliant, were the contributors recognised with CRediT roles? The institutional infrastructure to support this picture is most of what current adoption work is building.

    For institutions, the strategic implication is to treat ORCID adoption not as a compliance item but as research-infrastructure investment. The return on the investment compounds: each researcher with a complete ORCID record reduces friction across every subsequent application, every output deposit, every reporting cycle. The institutions that did the work in 2022-2025 are reaping the benefit in 2026; those that have not are still doing the manual work.

    Related dictionary entries

  • NSPM-33 implementation: 18 months in

    National Security Presidential Memorandum 33, issued in 2021 and operationalised through implementation guidance during 2022-2024, requires US federal research-funding recipients to disclose certain affiliations, support, and resources from foreign sources, with the aim of identifying conflicts of commitment and undue foreign influence. The major federal agency rollouts (NIH, NSF, DOE, DOD, NASA, USDA) became binding through 2024 and 2025. We are now 18 months into substantive implementation. This post is a status report.

    What NSPM-33 requires

    The disclosure requirements run across three axes. Current and pending support: applicants must disclose all sources of support for ongoing and planned research activities, including foreign sources, with structured detail. Biographical sketch: applicants must list all affiliations, including foreign ones, in a structured format. Conflicts of interest and commitment: applicants must disclose financial conflicts of interest, foreign relationships, and any obligations to entities that could constitute conflicts of commitment.

    The structure is mostly common-form across agencies — the Common Forms work coordinated by NSTC’s Joint Committee on the Research Environment produced templated disclosure formats — though agency-specific variations persist. The CASRAI NSPM-33 entry tracks the common-form versions.

    What worked

    Three things have worked better than was expected at rollout.

    First, institutional infrastructure. Most major research universities built the disclosure-collection and -review infrastructure during 2022-2024 in anticipation of binding requirements. By the binding date, most had functional systems: faculty-facing tools for disclosure entry, research-administration review workflows, integration with proposal-submission pipelines. The smaller and less-resourced institutions struggled more, but the AAU- and APLU-coordinated capacity-building efforts substantially closed the gap.

    Second, the common-form approach. The Common Forms work was widely criticised during development for being slow and produced-by-committee. The result has held up well: a researcher applying to multiple agencies can use the same biographical sketch and current-and-pending-support disclosures with only minor agency-specific extensions. The pre-Common-Forms world had every agency requiring its own format; the post-Common-Forms world has substantial harmonisation.

    Third, the compliance posture. The major agencies have, on the whole, used the disclosure requirements as compliance tools rather than enforcement weapons. The early concerns about a wave of investigations leveraging disclosure inconsistencies as the predicate for action have largely not materialised. Where investigations have proceeded, they have done so in cases with substantive concerns beyond disclosure failures alone.

    What is broken

    Three implementation problems persist.

    First, retroactive disclosure. The requirements ask for disclosure of historical affiliations and support, often going back several years. Researchers have variable recollection and variable access to records of those years. Honest mistakes — forgotten honorary positions, misremembered dates, inaccurate amounts on past awards — produce disclosure inconsistencies that institutions then have to investigate and resolve. The investigation overhead is substantial; the underlying integrity concerns are usually minor.

    Second, international-collaboration chilling. The disclosure requirements have, in our community’s observation, produced a chilling effect on international collaboration, particularly with collaborators in countries that the US identifies as competitor jurisdictions. Researchers report declining collaboration invitations they would previously have accepted, in part to avoid the disclosure overhead, in part out of caution about how the disclosed activity might later be interpreted. The chilling effect is hard to measure but is widely reported.

    Third, the institutional-versus-individual line. The disclosure requirements ask the individual researcher to disclose their affiliations, but many “foreign affiliations” are institutional arrangements (university-to-university partnerships, MOUs, joint programmes) that the individual researcher discovers only when asked to disclose them. The institutional research administration knows the partnerships; the individual researcher often does not. Surfacing institutional partnerships in individual-disclosure workflows is an unsolved UX problem.

    The ORCID interlock

    One concrete improvement that NSPM-33 implementation has driven is tighter integration with ORCID as the canonical record of researcher affiliations. ORCID 4.0’s affiliation history with ROR IDs and date ranges is the natural source for the biographical-sketch component of NSPM-33 disclosures; agencies are increasingly accepting ORCID-derived biographical sketches and several are piloting direct ingestion from ORCID at submission. The CASRAI ORCID implementation guide has been updated with the NSPM-33 patterns.

    The longer-term value of this integration is that it incentivises researchers to maintain a current and complete ORCID record, which has benefits well beyond compliance. The institutions that have invested in ORCID adoption are well-positioned for NSPM-33 compliance; the institutions that have not are pushing researchers to maintain disclosure information in institutional systems that diverge from ORCID, creating a synchronisation problem.

    The CRediT angle

    NSPM-33 does not require CRediT roles in disclosures, but the disclosure framework’s interest in “all sources of support” includes contributions to research activities. A researcher who contributed to a foreign-funded project — even without being a PI — has a disclosure obligation. The CRediT role framework provides a vocabulary for characterising those contributions, and several institutional implementations now use CRediT-aligned controlled vocabularies in their disclosure forms.

    What’s still pending

    Three institutional adjustments are still in motion 18 months in.

    First, training and culture. The disclosure requirements need to become routine, the way IRB compliance has become routine. Most institutions still treat disclosure as a special workflow with episodic attention; the maturity target is that disclosure is built into hiring, promotion, sabbatical, and proposal workflows as a routine compliance item.

    Second, institutional-individual reconciliation. The institutional partnerships and the individual disclosures need to be reconciled systematically. Several institutions have built dashboards that show, for each researcher, the institutional partnerships their disclosed affiliations imply, with prompts for confirmation. This is the right direction; it is not yet widely deployed.

    Third, cross-institutional data sharing. When a researcher moves between US institutions, their disclosure history needs to travel with them. The current state is that it does not, reliably; the new institution rebuilds the disclosure profile from scratch. This is wasteful and produces unnecessary inconsistencies. ORCID-anchored disclosure portability is the right architectural answer; institutional adoption is the missing piece.

    What CASRAI recommends

    For research-administration offices, the priority for 2026 is to consolidate the operational maturity of disclosure workflows: routine integration with proposal submission, ORCID-anchored biographical sketches, institutional-partnership reconciliation, training programmes that treat disclosure as a standard compliance item. The CASRAI institutional research-security guide walks through the maturity model.

    For researchers, the operating posture is to keep ORCID current, to maintain a personal log of affiliations and support that supports disclosure, and to treat disclosure as part of professional practice rather than as exceptional compliance.

    For agencies, the priority is to continue the common-form harmonisation work and to consider further ORCID integration. The 2026 update to the Common Forms is in development and the indications are positive.

    Related dictionary entries

  • What ‘broader impacts’ means under the new NSF policy

    The US National Science Foundation’s broader-impacts criterion, in force since the mid-1990s and refreshed periodically since, received its most significant revision in 2024 with rolling implementation through 2025-2026. The new policy sharpens what counts as a credible broader-impacts plan, what evidence applicants need to provide, and how reviewers should weight the criterion. This post is a practical orientation for applicants and research-administration offices handling NSF proposals in 2026.

    Broader impacts, briefly

    NSF merit review uses two co-equal criteria: intellectual merit (the scientific value of the proposed work) and broader impacts (the benefits to society beyond the immediate science). Broader impacts can be of many kinds: education and training of students, public engagement, infrastructure development, dissemination beyond peer-reviewed venues, increased participation of under-represented groups in STEM, partnerships with industry or non-academic users, contributions to national interests including economic competitiveness and security.

    The criterion has been criticised since its introduction for being weakly evaluated, for being treated as an afterthought to intellectual merit, and for accepting plausibility statements in lieu of evidence-based plans. The 2024 revision is the NSF’s response to those criticisms.

    What the new policy changes

    Three substantive changes.

    First, evidence-based planning. The new policy expects broader-impacts plans to be grounded in evidence from the broader-impacts and informal-STEM-learning literature. An applicant claiming that a proposed K-12 outreach activity will improve student interest in science needs to ground that claim in published evidence about what works in K-12 STEM engagement, not just assert it. The policy explicitly references the work of Bevan, Falk, Dierking, and others in the informal-learning research community.

    Second, measurable outcomes. Plans must specify what success looks like in observable terms, what data will be collected to assess success, and how the assessment will be conducted. Vague aspirations (“will inspire the next generation of scientists”) are not sufficient; observable indicators are required. The policy stops short of requiring randomised controlled trials of outreach activities but moves substantively toward evaluation rigour.

    Third, integration with intellectual merit. The policy emphasises that broader impacts should be substantively connected to the research, not bolted on as a separable activity. A proposal whose broader-impacts plan is a generic education-outreach activity unrelated to the science is now explicitly weaker than a proposal whose broader-impacts plan extends the science in directions that benefit specific communities.

    What this means for applicants

    The practical implications. First, build the broader-impacts plan into the proposal narrative, not into a separate annex. Show the connection between the science and the broader impact. The CASRAI NSF applicant guide walks through structural patterns that integrate the two.

    Second, cite evidence. If you propose outreach to under-represented groups, cite published evidence about effective interventions for those groups. If you propose a teacher-development workshop, cite the literature on effective teacher development. The expectation is not that applicants become broader-impacts researchers; it is that the plan is grounded in someone’s research, with citations.

    Third, specify the assessment. What will you measure? How will you measure it? Who will analyse the data? A typical strong assessment specifies: outcome measure (e.g., self-reported student interest in STEM career on a validated instrument); data collection (pre/post survey administration); analysis plan (paired-difference test with effect-size reporting); reporting venue (project annual report plus a conference paper).

    Fourth, partner with people who do this work. Researchers who are not broader-impacts specialists should partner with informal-STEM-education professionals, with community-engagement specialists at their institution, with K-12 educators who can co-design and assess interventions. The partnerships should be visible in the proposal: who is doing the work, what their qualifications are, what their role is.

    What this means for research administration

    Research-administration offices supporting NSF proposals should be upskilling around the new policy. Three priorities. First, build a broader-impacts library: a curated set of evidence-based plans, vetted partners, and assessment instruments that researchers can adapt. Second, offer structured proposal-development support that includes broader-impacts review by someone qualified to assess the evidence base. Third, support post-award assessment: the broader-impacts assessment plans now in proposals need to be executed during the award and reported in the final project report.

    The CASRAI institutional broader-impacts guide includes a checklist for research-administration offices building this capacity.

    How reviewers should evaluate

    NSF’s revised reviewer guidance asks reviewers to evaluate broader impacts on the same evidence-based and outcome-specified terms. A reviewer should ask: is the plan grounded in evidence? Are the outcomes measurable? Is the assessment credible? Is the broader-impacts work integrated with the research?

    This is a substantive shift. Pre-2024 reviewer guidance often produced broader-impacts ratings that reflected the reviewer’s gestalt impression of the applicant’s commitment. The new guidance pushes toward more analytic evaluation, with the explicit recognition that broader impacts is a domain with its own expertise and its own literature.

    The wider implications

    Three wider implications worth noting.

    First, the policy normalises broader-impacts research as a discipline. NSF has historically funded broader-impacts research thinly; the new policy implicitly raises the visibility of the field and the demand for its outputs. We expect funding for broader-impacts research itself to increase in subsequent budget cycles.

    Second, the policy aligns with the international move toward structured impact reporting. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework impact case studies, the EU’s Horizon Europe expected-impact framework, and several other funder frameworks all push in similar directions. CASRAI’s engagement, impact, and SDG domain tracks the international landscape.

    Third, the policy creates a soft incentive toward partnerships between research-intensive universities and the institutions (community colleges, K-12 systems, science museums, community organisations) that have broader-impacts capacity. The partnerships, where they work, are mutually beneficial; where they do not, broader impacts becomes a service-delivery problem dressed as a research-grant activity.

    Open questions

    Two open questions for 2026 and beyond. First, the resource implications: an evidence-based broader-impacts plan with a real assessment costs money, sometimes a substantial fraction of the project budget. NSF has signalled that meaningful broader-impacts costs are budgetable and reviewable on their merits, but the budget pressure is real, particularly for small grants. Second, the equity implications: applicants from research-intensive universities have easier access to broader-impacts capacity than applicants from less-resourced institutions. The new policy may inadvertently widen the gap between institution categories. NSF is aware of this risk and the next policy update is expected to address it.

    For applicants in 2026, the operating posture is to take the new policy seriously, partner with people who do this work, ground your plan in evidence, specify the assessment, and integrate broader impacts with the research. The bar has risen; the proposals that clear it will be substantially stronger than the pre-2024 baseline.

    Related dictionary entries