Mandating the Use of ORCID

The most important scientific publishers in physics and chemistry encourage researchers to register with ORCID. They collect ORCIDs in their manuscript submission and peer review systems and some include ORCIDs in the articles themselves.

Only some journals require an ORCID. But others will follow. When submitting a paper to a journal of the American Chemical Society corresponding authors are required to provide their own personal ORCID before completing the submission process. SpringerNature is running a six-month trial to mandate ORCIDs for authors publishing across 46 of their journals (e.g. Nature Chemistry; Nature Physics).

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a non-profit organization which aims to establish a registry for author identificaton as the de facto standard like the ISBN for books or the DOI for online publications.

Benefits of having an ORCID:

  • solves the name ambiguity problem (name equivalence, change of name, different spelling)
  • associates your scientific output (articles, datasets and others) with your biography
  • updates your publication list in your ORCID profile automatically – you can enable automatic updates from data providers, e.g. CrossRef, Scopus, ResearcherID – Web of Science
  • simplifies communication, e.g. for grant submissions, article submissions or meeting registrations

Introduction to ORCID

Brown, Josh: ORCID: an introduction, Presentation at the 1. ORCID DE Outreach Workshop. Potsdam, Germany, October 25, 2016
https://zenodo.org/record/163564

Vierkant, Paul: ORCID in Deutschland – Stand und Perspektive, 1. ORCID DE-Webinar: ORCID – eine Einführung für wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen (Potsdam 2017)
http://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2185897

ORCID Registry has launched

ORCID is ready now for registration. As a researcher, you can register to get your unique persistent identifier. The ORCID iD will support you so that all your publications in different databases are identified or it will be ingetrated in research workflows such as manuscript or grant submissions. Furthermore you may use your ORCID profile to claim your publications. ORCID is a non-profit organization which aims to establish a registry for author identificaton as the de facto standard.

Nature News: “Scientists, your number is up”

Nature reports about the launch of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). ORCID is a non-profit organization which aims to establish a registry for author identificaton as the de facto standard. Individual researchers may create an ORCID record without a membership fee as of later this year.

“When the scheme opens for business in the coming months, it will at first rely on large publishers and research agencies to build a critical mass of registrants, because they can require researchers to provide or register for an ORCID number in order to publish a paper or submit a grant proposal.” (Nature, 485, 564 (), doi:10.1038/485564a)

The article points to the problem that many research institutions don’t realize the practical value of ORCID and that many researchers have never heard of it.

More information about ORCID:

Author identifiers

Unique identifiers for scholarly authors can be useful, e.g. for linking to an individual’s research output.

But author identifiers are not widely used, perhaps because they are not so easy to implement. Here are three popular systems that are integrated in e-print archives / bibliographic databases:

  • ArXiv Author ID
  • Researcher ID (Web of Science)
  • Scopus Author ID

The systems aim to identify all publications of an author indexed in the related database and some are linked with profile information about the authors. Therefor name variants or name changes of a particular person has to be included. Another problem to solve is to distinguish different people with the same name. Mostly this works not sufficient because intellectual reviewing and user feedback is needed. While Scopus AuthorID relies on external claims, ResearcherID allows only authors to register for an ID number and to create their own publication list.

Be careful by using the author identifiers for databases searches. Experience has shown that you usually will not get a complete and correct publication list.

Last but not least a hint to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) must not be missed here. ORCID is a non-profit organization which aims to establish a registry for author identificaton as the de facto standard. “The Open Researcher and Contributor ID would be an alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies an individual scientist in much the same way that a Digital Object Identifier uniquely identifies a paper, book or other scholarly publication.” (Nature, 462, 825 (17 December 2009) doi:10.1038/462825a [only for subscribers])

References:
Fenner, Martin (2011): Author Identifier Overview. In: LIBREAS.Library Ideas, Jg. 7, H. 1 (18). http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/docviews/abstract.php?lang=&id=37867
ArXiv Author ID. http://arxiv.org/help/author_identifiers
Researcher ID. http://www.researcherid.com
Scopus Author ID. http://help.scopus.com/robo/projects/schelp/h_autsrch_intro.htm
ORCID. http://orcid.org/