Will Simpson Email Address

Director, Technology

ORCID is a community-driven non-profit organization that aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in research and scholarly communications.

Will is a software development manager, with over twenty years experience in the industry. In his current role at ORCID, he manages a team of eight software, devops and QA engineers, who are responsible for developing and hosting the ORCID Registry and other systems. Will manages the USD300K hosting budget for all ORCID’s external systems. He also has overall responsibility for the user support team composed of a manager and three users support specialists, handling around 6000 tickets a month. Furthermore, he is the Privacy and Security Officer for ORCID, with oversight of organizational compliance with GDPR and other laws worldwide. In this role, he works with and manages relationships with external legal and privacy experts. Will graduated in 2000 with a first class honours degree in Physics from University College London, having worked on numerical simulation software for his final year research project. He then worked for the publishing company John Wiley & Sons Ltd, developing distribution software to deliver online book and journal content to Wiley Interscience and third parties such as PubMed and ProQuest. He then moved to Semantico Ltd where he was part of the development team that created the DawsonEra online publishing platform. DawsonEra subsequently became the largest supplier of electronic books to academic libraries in the UK, containing over 300,000 books. Will enjoyed a period away from software development when he went overseas to teach English as a foreign language, earning a CELTA certificate while studying and training in Latvia. He then went to Nepal as a volunteer, where he taught English to a parents group at a local school, and at a Buddhist monastery. He then returned to John Wiley & Sons Ltd as a consultant, working on tracking and content transformation systems for their new publishing platform, Wiley Online Library. Also, he was part of the team that developed a rules based system for delivering e-book content to vendors such as Apple and Amazon. After another stint at Semantico, Will became an independent contractor working for ORCID, before becoming a permanent member of staff and progressing to the position of Technical Director.