“ORCID addresses a problem shared by individuals and organizations across the research community: reliably connecting research with researchers,” said Laure Haak, Executive Director of the non-profit ORCID organization. “But ORCID is more than a Registry, it is a community effort to embed these identifiers in research workflows.”
Understanding the ”who” and “what” of research has been hampered by lack of data standards, and in particular a standard for identifying individuals. Universities and other research organizations, as well as membership organizations like the American Physical Society (APS) are working to integrate ORCID identifiers into their systems. “For scholars, ORCID provides a persistent identifier that unambiguously distinguishes you as the author or creator of your published works in systems that adopt ORCID. Through integration in workflows such as manuscript and grant submission as well as researcher profiles, ORCID promises to help scholars and institutions manage academic information and, ultimately, to provide both with more control over their own record of scholarship,” said Amy Brand, Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments and Information at Harvard University. Currently, Boston University, New York University Langone Medical Center, Cornell University, and the California Institute of Technology, and the research information system vendors Avedas, Symplectic, and Thomson Reuters are actively working on integration with the ORCID registry.
Other researcher identifier systems are currently in use serving specific populations or types of research work. ORCID does not compete with these systems, but rather provides a switchboard for crosslinking. Elsevier is providing a way for researchers to link their Scopus Author IDs to ORCID and synchronize their publication information between the two systems. Thomson Reuters’ ResearcherID® will link to ORCID and allow researchers to synchronize their publication information. Several research information system providers are also planning to integrate ORCID identifiers, including figshare, KNODE, Faculty of 1000, and ImpactStory. Through its affiliate ORCID EU, ORCID is working with DataCite to link ORCID identifiers with research datasets.
“ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries, and has great potential for solving the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications,” explained Howard Ratner, Chair of ORCID and Chief Technology Officer of Nature Publishing Group. “Publishers have used several different naming schemes for authors and contributors. Commonly occurring names and name changes during a researcher’s career has led to difficulties linking authors and contributors with their works.” Nature Publishing Group is among a group of Launch Partners, along with Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Aries Systems, Thomson Reuters, and the American Physical Society (APS), that are integrating ORCID identifiers into the manuscript submission process.
In addition to research organizations, higher education institutions and publishers, ORCID is working with research funders including The Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health to explore how ORCID identifiers might be linked into the grant application process. Liz Allen, Evaluation lead at The Wellcome Trust, notes, “An ongoing challenge for funders is tracking the outputs and outcomes of research we have funded. Over time, the Wellcome Trust plans to integrate ORCID identifiers into our online grant application and reporting systems so we can easily link researchers to works they create and reduce reporting burdens for researchers while helping us to better understand the impact of our funding.”
ORCID, was established in 2010 as non-profit organization serving the research community. For more information on ORCID, please see https://orcid.org.
