The Circle U. Academic Directory
The directory has been developed to facilitate collaboration between researchers and academics from Circle U. universities. It provides an easy way for researchers from the nine universities of the Circle U. European University Alliance to get in touch with one another by searching their research fields and send a direct email to initiate collaboration.
To appear in the Circle U. Academic Directory, users need to have an ORCID (orcid.org) profile.
This is how the directory works
The Circle U. Academic Directory harvests data from the ORCID database. Why ORCID? Because it is becoming a de-facto international standard accepted by most publishers and researchers. ORCID provides automatic discovery of scientific publications, which helps researchers have up-to-date profiles. The Academic Directory can easily gather public ORCID data of the Circle U. researchers with no need to add and maintain it separately.
Create your ORCID profile if you don't already have one
Visit orcid.org to create your ORCID profile.
Get listed in the Circle U. Academic Directory with your ORCID profile
First, make sure you have only one ORCID profile. If you have multiple ones, you may want to merge them. Update your ORCID profile (orcid.org) as follows:
- Add the "CircleU." tag in the “Keywords” field ("CircleU" without “dot” is also valid). Please note: by adding the “CircleU” tag, you give an implicit consent to the Academic Directory to use your personal name, the keywords related to your research areas and your university and publicly list them in the CircleU. Academic Directory.
- We recommend you update the “Keyword” field with information about your research areas, interests and activities, starting from the wide research discipline going into more specific areas
- Examples:
- Biology, Molecular biology, Epigenetics, Chromatin Dynamics, Histone variant
- Astronomy, Black holes, Parallel universes
- Examples:
- Check/Update the name of the home university in the “Organization” field within the “Employment” section. The system recognizes only the names listed below. Do not be confused with the section “Education and qualifications”, which could be also filled in, but it is not checked by the system.
- Check/Update the “Employment” section - the “End date” must remain empty, meaning the employment status is still valid at the university.
All this information must be visible to “Everyone” in the visibility settings (which is a default visibility option for those fields).
The allowed university names used for filtering and data harvesting are:
- Aarhus University, University in Aarhus, Aarhus Universitet
- University of Oslo
- University of Belgrade, Univerzitet u Beograd
- King's College London, Kings College London
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin
- UCLouvain, University of Louvain, Catholic University of Louvain, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Université Catholique de Louvain, UCL
- Université Paris Cité, University of Paris,Universite de Paris,Université de Paris
- Università di Pisa, University of Pisa, Universita di Pisa
- Universität Wien, University of Vienna, Universitat Wien
Please note that by updating the ORCID profile according to the instructions above, the profile will automatically appear in the directory by the next day and not immediately, since the system harvests and updates data during the night.
However, this can be bypassed if a user proceeds with the next step by signing in to the Academic Directory, which is a suggested way to complete the registration at once, as a more convenient process for the users.
Updating your Academic Directory profile
- The point of the Academic Directory is to enable researchers to get in touch with one another. To provide an email address, you must sign in to the Academic Directory and update your Academic Directory profile. (Unless you have marked your email address as publicly visible in your ORCID profile – in that case your email address will be harvested as well as all the other information you provided)
- Users with an email address are marked with an icon both on public and signed-in view. Please note: your email address will never be shown to anyone, not even to other Academic Directory users.
- The Academic Directory sign-in process is integrated with the ORCID platform: you will be redirected to the ORCID sign-in popup page and requested to enter your ORCID username and password. The ORCID system alternatively offers sign-in by institutional account, Google or Facebook account, but the ORCID account is still necessary to connect them on the first sing-in.
- Upon a successful sign-in, you will be redirected to the Academic Directory landing page, listing all Circle U. academics, along with the users’ personal names in the top-right corner.
- Clicking on your name in the top-right corner, a simple menu is shown. By clicking on the first option “View/Edit my CircleU profile”, a new popup opens, allowing you to enter an email address.
- To send a direct message to the selected person, a user must be signed-in and must have an email address in their Academic Directory profile. Therefore, by clicking on the mail icon for the selected person a pop-up contact form opens, where you can enter a subject field and the message body (max 500 characters). The email will be sent by the Academic Directory to the selected academic, while a copy will be also sent to the sender (as a recipient in the “CC” email field).
- The message is sent from the “no-reply@” email address which suggests not to use this email to reply, but rather a real email address of the sender, which is automatically filled in by the system at the beginning of the message body.
- It is suggested that, before sending a real message to the intended academic, you try to send an email to yourself first to see how it looks and works, to better structure your message.
Privacy note
Safety usage and data privacy issues have been carefully considered.
The Academic Directory only gathers public data provided by ORCID public API (name, keywords, employments and email if it’s publicly visible). The email address that you provided in your Academic Directory profile is treated as private data and other users and visitors cannot see it. Your email address is only revealed to the recipient of the direct message when you send it through the Academic Directory, which is the way to establish contact with Circle U. colleagues. Email addresses will always stay hidden and protected from spam and other misuses.
Minimal data are shown, and all these data are already marked by ORCID users as public under the Creative Commons Public Domain license, following the ORCID privacy policy. By giving explicit consent by adding the “CircleU” tag to the ORCID profile, users agree to appear in the directory, allowing their names and research interest to be publicly available.