A call to membership organisations to take a look at ORCiD

One of the recurring themes at both BTPDF2 in March and at the more recent UKSG Conference in Bournemouth in April was the importance of having verifiable information about researchers in all their guises, whether as writers of articles, speakers at conferences, members of academic institutions, and the persistence of this information as they move around. Academics are generally members of a number of groups and as these multiply online many are replicating the networking attributes which were, and still are, important within more traditional membership organisations.

 

Researchers face the challenge of having to distinguish their work from others with similar names and the on-going problem of having to register, often the same, information on multiple sites. How do you go about discretely identifying participants across disciplines, institutions and countries who repeatedly have to enter the same information for manuscript submission, grants and organisations?

ORCiD ® has been established as an open, community-based way to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and to link research activities/outputs to these identifiers. At the UKSG Conference Laurel Haak, (@orcid_org), Executive Director at ORCiD put out a call to membership organisations to encourage their members to register for an ORCiD iD. This is a sixteen-digit number expressed as an HTTP URI e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-4301 that importantly is unique and persistent for use throughout the owner’s career. ORCiD is an open identifier with APIs which can be used in any setting.

For the true benefits of the ORCiD Registry to be realised researchers need to create their own iD account (this is a 30 second registration on the ORCiD website) and for information systems such as societies and publishers to adopt ORCiD iD as a standard person identifier, embedding ORCiD iDs and linking these back with the ORCiD Registry.

Learned societies are asked to encourage members to register on orcid.org and to integrate the ORCiD iDs into their membership and conference registration systems; academic institutions should link iDs to repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and publishers integrate them into manuscript submission and production systems. Adoption of ORCiD is growing with over 120,000 registered users as of 22nd April and registration growing by ~9000 per week.

As the number of people registering grows, the number of organisations joining and embedding iDs in workflows is also increasing. Associations, funders (NIH, Wellcome Trust), publishers and article submission systems (Nature, Hindawi), repositories and profile systems (EBI-EMBL, CrossRef, F1000Research, figshare) and research organisations.

Linking back to BTPDF2 meeting (see summary), one of the interesting uses of the public API is by ImpactStory which aggregates metadata from articles, datasets, blog posts and more to create an impact based on usage of these. Another recent initiative, Rubriq .com 

which may interest researchers is currently collecting ORCiDs for authors and reviewers with a view to use this to replace manual verification.

ORCiD isn’t the only iD system for individuals, but they have thought about that. ORCiD has just issued a joint statement with International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) on the need for interoperability between the organisations.

To find out more go to http://orcid.org or watch a very engaging talk by Laurel Haak on the UKSG Conference YouTube channel and encourage your members to register.