 All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and it's good to see so many of you on this call. Thank you, ARDC for inviting me to talk a bit about AAF and ORCID and the things that do. So for those of you who don't know, my name is Melroy, work at the AAF. One of the things that I look after at the AAF is the Australian ORCID Consortium and some of the other things I'm working on is looking at linkages between persistent identifiers like ORCIDs, DOIs, some of the things that Natasha and Siobhan have mentioned in their presentation. So I'll get to that. But at the AAF, what AAF actually does is it enables seamless identity and access for the Australian research and education sector. So for those of you who at any point in time have access to various resources like publications or data sets or even research infrastructure services like CloudStore using your institutional username or password, effectively you're using federated identity or you're using it's possible because of the Australian access federation or the federation in general. Now, why would you want to use an identity federation? Why exactly is it needed? So researchers need access to data, they need access to infrastructure, they need access to funding. Organizations on the other hand want to ensure that they know what sort of resources researchers are accessing, are they accessing certain publications, are they accessing certain facilities and the idea behind that is that then they can get a much better idea about whether to invest more in keeping those facilities if enough use isn't being seen then could they move that investment onto something else that is seeing greater use. So what the identity federation needs does is that it enables a more interconnected, efficient and secure research and education system for Australia but also it helps researchers, teachers and students to collaborate with their peers so they can be national collaborations so between universities in Australia it could be international collaborations, universities or organizations abroad, industry partners and even the government. It also allows researchers to deliver world-class research outcomes because with the federation what it does is it provides researchers with access to world-class research infrastructures then there is access as in the trust and identity framework used by the federation allows them to meet their research needs they can use just one username and password and what they focus on mostly is working on their research not the IT side of things or the administrative side of things which is what is important to them. So and why do you need the identity federation because you want to provide your researchers with secure access to research if you think of data as the new oil user accounts get access to systems and system access provides access to the data but cyber criminals want access to user accounts now if you're using one username and password which is secure which is trusted your institution has given it to you after verifying your identity it means that it's highly assured and quite secure so what that means is you do then have secure access to research infrastructure. So and how does the Australian Federation help what it does is as I mentioned it allows researchers to use their institutional username and password and they can access shared resources and services nationally as well as internationally and they don't have to remember multiple usernames or multiple passwords right and the AEF also has over 100 organizations that are members of the AEF so this includes all the Australian universities CSIRO New South Wales Health we've got some medical research institutes as well as the Australian State of Marine Sciences and we also have 300 services that are part of the Federation which means and there's also global collaborations to over 270 plus international research services that that happens through EDGE again which is another service that the AEF provides so that brings me to ORCID as Natasha mentioned about persistent identifiers ORCID is a persistent identifier for researchers it's unique it's persistent it's community driven and it's a not-for-profit and ORCID stands for open researcher and contributor ID what that means is it allows for researchers to disambiguate themselves so name disambiguation in research is quite hard and was quite hard before ORCID because you could have a lot of John Smiths but you wouldn't know which John Smith to cite as part of your paper especially if you had three or four of them working in the same field what an ORCID ID does is because it would be unique for each John Smith you would then be able to attribute and cite their work correctly and ORCID's vision is that they think there should be a world where everyone who participates in research or any sort of scholarship activity they need to be connected to their contributions across time across discipline as well as borders so it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that just because you work at one university and then you decide to change organizations you lose apps you lose whatever you've done previously or because you decide you want to change your name doesn't mean that everything you've done under your former name you lose access to that or you no longer get attributed for it because research is an ongoing thing it's continuous development and you should be able to get you should be able to be recognized for all your contributions that you've made now about the Australian ORCID Consortium it is a national ORCID community it was launched in 2016 what you see over here is the timeline from when it was launched to about 2021 in 2016 at the end of 2016 52 percent of our members had integrated with ORCID at the end of 2020 it's now 83 percent of our members have integrated and the consortium started off with 40 members and in 2020 at the end of 2020 and even in 2021 we've got 42 members now who are Australian ORCID Consortium members right so since the launch of the consortium Australian ORCID IDs have been constantly increasing as you can see from this graph at this stage as of 1st January 2021 more than 152,000 ORCID IDs were registered to Australian email addresses but importantly also 83 percent of our consortium members have integrated with ORCID and it's quite quite varied in terms of the integration so about 18 of it have been custom or bespoke integrations 27 of them have gone with a vendor of some sort and we've got 35 members who've done an ORCID integration but there are 45 total integrations which means that some members have done multiple ORCID integrations so so how do you enable seamless authentication and track all this scholarly research and the contributions that researchers make you start off with you get researchers to sign in using their institutional credentials put in their username put in their password login they get access to that resource right but more importantly as an organization you need to do an ORCID integration you need to be able to collect authenticated ORCID IDs once you've done that what you'd want to do is advertise these collected and authenticated ORCID IDs as an attribute to the federation now within the federation what we have is we have an attribute that is specific to ORCID it's called edu person ORCID attribute and what that means is as Shivon was referencing earlier is that using the edu person ORCID attribute as an identifier when you are working on various projects it means that as a researcher if you move from one university to another university or one organization to another organization even though your username and password may change if access to that particular research resource is based on the edu person ORCID attribute it would just be seamless so even if you change organizations you'll still have access to it and then what we also need to do is we need to get services and infrastructure providers to use the ORCID attribute from the federation so it's not just organizations doing the ORCID integrations and exposing it to the federation but we also need to get services using this particular attribute now why would you want to do this right most importantly you want to do it for transparency you want to make sure that access to particular research resources is authenticated there is a high level of assurance associated with it and more importantly is you want to be able to disambiguate between researchers who are accessing those resources right you want to also look at it to see who is this access to what service so that you can then establish research provenance you can look at reproducibility and the confidence that then comes from this level of assurance means that researchers will get acknowledged for their contributions to the scholarly body of knowledge next thing is comprehensive this right there is a lot of information about researchers who've received grants who've used research facilities written publications and I employed by organizations all this information is present but might not necessarily be interconnected having seamless access and using the same username and password across all services across the board and using persistent identifiers like ORCIDs or DOIs what it does is it allows for interconnectivity between various entities like your research organizations between infrastructure providers as well as funding agencies and publishers then everybody's favorite is reporting right however to be able to confidently report on usage or on anything what you need to do is you need to be able to trust the data that you have and data that comes from sources of truth for example if it's an organization that employs a researcher having that affiliation information asserted by the organization is important you can be fairly confident that it is the right information right another things that you can another sort of things that you can report on is the proportion of research conducted by Australian researchers you can look at how much research has been conducted by international researchers there's also a possibility of looking at how much research that was done is rated at world class or above and how much of that actually use Australian research infrastructures and you can even look at collaborations between different organizations right now this over here what you see is an example of a collaboration network that I did with Amir on looking at the amount of collaborations that various countries and organizations did with regards to COVID-19 and what this shows is that we found out that by December 2020 40 around 47,000 organizations were collaborating with each other if we look when we looked at December 2009 it was 1500 and December 2019 that was about 3000 odd organizations that were collaborating so what you can see is that you can this was possible only because there were ORCID IDs there were DOIs associated with each other they were all linked together which then allowed us to infer collaborations between different organizations now any questions great thank you Melroy there were some questions there in the chat can you see the chat Melroy because yes I can see them now okay great do you want to go ahead sure we're starting from a research work done in a private Australian organization doing a research project that is registered with OZ industry can have access to AAF access IDs or get an ORCID ID or is it only for universities it is open for any it's open to any organization so at the AAF we've got subscribers that are part of the Australian research sector that are part of the government and even independent organizations so even commercial organizations so they don't have to be only related to they don't have to only be a university it could be any of those organizations and that shouldn't be a problem they should be able to use it what we get them to do is organizations that have a single username and password or use the institutional username and password if they want to access multiple services they can join the AAF and we can help facilitate