In January 2016, eight publishers signed an open letter committing their organizations to requiring ORCID iDs for journal authors. Importantly, they also committed to adopting our best practices when implementing this requirement, to ensure that it would benefit their authors, their organizations, and the wider scholarly community. This includes collecting validated ORCID iDs to ensure the correct iD is associated with the author, displaying iDs in articles to signal support for ORCID, and including ORCID iDs with the metadata sent to Crossref to support auto-update of authors’ ORCID records when their article publishes.
The eight original signatories – AGU, eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, PLOS, The Royal Society, and Science journals – were joined by a further 12 publishers in the months that followed, and 10 publishers have now gone live with their ORCID requirement. On November 28, their efforts received a significant boost when two major societies – the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry – and one of the world’s largest scholarly publishers, Wiley, signed the letter.
Explaining their reasons for supporting ORCID in this way, Sarah Tegen, Ph.D., Vice President of Global Editorial & Author Services at ACS Publications, said: “We are pleased now to align with the Royal Society of Chemistry in this endeavor, as both societies underscore our willingness not only to encourage and assist our respective authors in establishing their unique ORCID profiles, but also to help tackle the broader challenge of researcher name disambiguation in the scholarly literature. With the integration of author ORCID iDs in our publishing workflows, we will ensure that researchers receive proper credit for their accomplishments.”
Emma Wilson, Ph.D., Director of Publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry added: “ORCID can and will make a huge difference to our authors’ ability to gain full credit for their work. A unified system that integrates and links research-related information with accurate and timely linkage to the publishing output of authors has the potential to simplify and speed up their grant applications — something we know is important to researchers.”
Judy Verses, Executive Vice President, Research at Wiley, the largest publisher to sign the open letter to date, noted that: “our action to require ORCID iDs is an example of our commitment to improving the management of research data by resolving name ambiguity among the research community. We will continue to consult with society partners to expand adoption across our titles and hope that other publishers will follow our lead.”
While this is an initiative that is very much driven by the publishing community, ORCID’s Executive Director Laure Haak warmly welcomed the three organizations as Open Letter signatories: “The growing use of ORCID by scholarly associations and publishers contributes to building a trusted framework for discoverability and supports researchers ability to easily share their work.”
You can read ACS/RSC and Wiley’s announcements here and here.
Stop press! Wellcome Open Research has also signed the open letter, and have been requiring ORCID iDs for authors since November 16.
We will be reporting more fully on the open letter to mark its first anniversary in January, including feedback from the publishers who have gone live with their ORCID requirement and researchers who are using the auto-update service.
