Planned · Phase 4
ORCID push widget
Authenticate with ORCID, fetch your CRediT-tagged published works, and push per-role contribution records onto your ORCID profile so the visible signal is “Investigation: lead on 12 papers” — not “co-author on 17 papers”.
Today
What works without the widget
When a publisher does three things at submission and deposit time, your CRediT attribution flows into ORCID without any action on your part. First, the publisher captures CRediT structurally in their submission system (ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, eJP, or OJS — most major systems support this). Second, they emit <role> elements in the JATS XML they send to production using the canonical NISO URIs documented at /credit/jats. Third, they include those roles on the Crossref deposit using the contributor_role element with your ORCID iD on the same contributor row.
Crossref then notifies ORCID via the auto-update push, and ORCID writes the per-contribution row to your record with Crossref as the source. To verify it’s happening for one of your publications, open your record at orcid.org/<iD>, expand the relevant work, and look for “Contributor roles” rows under the Crossref source row. If you see them — you’re done. If you don’t and the paper was published recently at a CRediT-supporting publisher, the publisher may not yet be depositing structured CRediT (this is the common gap). Ask them.
The publisher coverage map at /publishers shows which publishers deposit structured CRediT to Crossref today. For an author-side checklist to use when speaking to your publisher, see /credit/for-authors.
Phase 4
What the widget will add
The widget closes the loop for cases the auto-update pipeline doesn’t cover. There are two common gaps. The first is historical backfill: papers you published before your publisher started depositing CRediT to Crossref — common for pre-2018 works at the early-adopter publishers and pre-2022 works at the second-wave adopters — have no CRediT on the existing Crossref deposit. The widget will let you assert your own roles on these papers and write them to ORCID with source = "CASRAI ORCID push (self-asserted)", which ORCID surfaces distinctly from publisher-asserted roles.
The second is edge-case publishers: a small but non-trivial cohort capture CRediT at submission as narrative free-text rather than as structured roles, so nothing makes it into the Crossref deposit. The widget will let you copy your CRediT statement from your published PDF, parse the role assignments, and push them to ORCID — again with the source field clearly marked as self-asserted. The widget will not let you push contradictory roles where a publisher-asserted row already exists; instead it will surface the discrepancy and prompt you to take it up with the publisher.
All writes will use the narrowest possible scope (/activities/update), never request /authenticate beyond the session lifetime, and never request the email scope. Revoking the CASRAI source token from your ORCID privacy settings will remove every row we wrote without affecting publisher-asserted rows.
Workflow preview
How the widget will work in practice
- Sign in with ORCID. The OAuth screen will show exactly the scope requested (
/activities/update); consent is per-session. - Pick the works to enrich. The widget will fetch the works on your ORCID record, cross-reference each with Crossref to find existing CRediT, and present a checklist of works that don’t yet have structured CRediT but where you are a named contributor.
- Assign your roles. For each work, pick the subset of the 14 CRediT roles that describe what you did, with an optional lead / equal / supporting qualifier.
- Review and push. The widget will show the final batch of writes before committing, including the source field that will be set on each row. Push is one click; ORCID confirms each write within seconds.
- Verify on orcid.org. Open your ORCID record and confirm the rows appear under each work, sourced as “CASRAI ORCID push (self-asserted)”.
The widget will not store your ORCID iD, your works list, or your role assignments server-side. State persists only in your browser’s session storage for the duration of the push.
Trust & transparency
Privacy and scope guarantees
- The widget requests the narrowest OAuth scope sufficient for the job —
/activities/update, never/read-public/email. - No persistent server-side storage of your ORCID iD, work list, or role assignments. State lives in your browser session.
- Self-asserted rows are clearly source-tagged on your ORCID profile; you can revoke our source token in your ORCID privacy settings and ORCID will remove every row we wrote.
- The widget runs entirely in your browser against ORCID’s public API; CASRAI servers never see your access token. See the privacy posture at /legal/privacy.
- The widget will never push contradictory roles over an existing publisher-asserted row; it surfaces discrepancies and prompts you to take them up with the publisher instead.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- What does the ORCID push widget actually do?
- It authenticates you with ORCID using the OAuth /activities/update scope, finds your CRediT-tagged published works (via Crossref deposits indexed against your ORCID iD), and writes a CRediT contribution record per role onto your ORCID profile so that visitors to orcid.org/0000-...-XXXX see "Investigation: lead on N papers; Methodology: equal on M; …" rather than a flat publication count.
- Why is this not already happening automatically?
- It usually is — but only when the publisher deposits CRediT to Crossref alongside your ORCID iD. Some publishers capture CRediT structurally at submission but do not yet emit it on the deposit, and some capture it as narrative free-text rather than as structured roles. The widget fills the gap for those cases and lets you backfill historical papers that pre-date your publisher's CRediT capture.
- Will the widget overwrite my existing ORCID record?
- No. The widget writes additive entries against your works using the casrai.org/credit role URIs as the source-name. ORCID treats source-named contribution rows as additive, not overwriting. You can revoke our source token from your ORCID account at any time and ORCID will remove the rows we wrote.
- What scopes does the widget request?
- The narrowest practical: /activities/update for the lifetime of the session, with the option to extend to /read-limited for an offline refresh. We do not request /authenticate or /read-public, and we do not request the email scope. The OAuth screen at ORCID will display exactly what is requested before you consent.
- When does it ship?
- In CASRAI Phase 4 (target late-2026). Before then, see the manual workflow on this page — most researchers find that their publishers already do the right thing and the widget would only be useful for historical backfill or for closing edge-case gaps.
- Can I push CRediT for someone else (a postdoc, a collaborator)?
- No. ORCID's OAuth model authenticates the individual record-holder; we will not implement a third-party-write path. If you want a colleague's record updated, point them at this page. For institutional bulk operations against a roster of researchers, see /for-institutions/cris — your CRIS may already do this on the institutional side.
