ORCID attended the 248th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco in August. ACS is both an ORCID sponsor and member organization, and it now requests ORCID identifiers during journal manuscript submission. We met with a number of the nearly 15,000 scientists and students who participated in this event at our exhibitor booth.
With each conference we attend, we find researchers are becoming more familiar with ORCID. They report having encountered ORCID in multiple contexts: during manuscript submission, grant application, dataset publication, and during meeting abstract submission, and professional association membership renewal. These integrations by our members have driven ORCID registrations at a pace that should reach 1 million in the next 2 months.
One million is substantial for a Registry that relies on researcher self-registration. But there are many more than 1 million active researchers in the world. We also find that both researchers and members have an incomplete understanding of the benefits of persistent identifiers. We need to make sure that identfiers are not just collected but also embedded in research documents and disseminated in repositories so that search precision is improved. We need to make sure that researchers understand that an ORCID iD is a key to reducing paperwork for any number of different applications, including various profile systems.
We need your help. We will be developing new materials for our members to support their integrations, including how-to guides for each sector, concise messaging for researchers, and expanded technical assistance. We would like your feedback on your needs. What can we provide to you that will help you make the case for persistent identifiers–within your organziation and among your users. Please contact us at [email protected] with your suggestions. If your organization isn’t yet an ORCID member, we invite you to learn more about how you–and your scholars and researchers–can benefit from using ORCID on our member and organization pages.
Have suggestions? Questions? Contact ORCID at [email protected].
We look forward to hearing from you.