Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) in the United States

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a system for scholars to register for a unique identifier and fill out a profile with information about scholarly activities. The ORCID registration system stores information about the scholar, publications, and scholarly activities. The information ORCID stores goes beyond publications and includes information about grants, service as a reviewer on journals, and a wide variety of information that goes beyond a citation list. Users can mark each scholarly activity in ORCID as private or public, so it is possible to keep a complete curriculum vitae behind the scenes in ORCID while only displaying a polished concise profile to the world. At its core, ORCID allows name disambiguation on publications, grants, and scholarly activities. ORCID also includes a web application program interface (API), which allows different applications, websites, institutional repositories, and other systems to read records from ORCID, update ORCID, or write new records to ORCID. An application run by anyone, anywhere in the world can use the ORCID identifier to disambiguate scholars with similar names. The application can then interact with the information about that person’s scholarly activities. Right now, there is buzz about ORCID. Some big projects in Europe, like Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), have gone to a process of pushing records to ORCID as materials are added to a repository or research system. Funder mandates across Europe now require grant recipients to keep records in ORCID about grant-funded research, including: in Portugal, projects funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT); in Austria, projects funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF); in the United Kingdom, projects funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NHIR) or by Wellcome; in Ireland, projects funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI); and in Sweden, projects funded by the Swedish Research Council (SRC). Grants through all those institutions require recipients to record grant-funded activity in ORCID, so grant recipients have recently had to address ORCID. Another reason for the recent buzz about ORCID is that some scholarly journals have begun requiring authors submitting papers to include an ORCID along with contact information as part of the submission process. If you see a published paper where all authors have an ORCID listed along with institutional affiliation, that’s a sign that the journal is requiring authors to provide an ORCID. The purposes of that are so someone indexing the paper can disambiguate authors and someone wanting to contact an author who has changed jobs can check the ORCID profile for current contact information of someone with a common name. Some grant applications in the United States also will request the ORCID identifier, although to my knowledge, none are yet requiring recipients to post information to ORCID.
Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)12-14
Number of pages3
JournalTechnical Services Law Librarian (TSLL)
Volume42
Issue number3
StatePublished - Mar 2017

DC Disciplines

  • Social and Behavioral Sciences
  • Library and Information Science

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