Unique identification numbers for researchers!
Have you often wondered how your research activities and achievements can be distinguished from those of other researchers with similar names? If your name appears as “Zhang W” on your research publications, how can you prevent another “Zhang W” from taking credit for your citations or patents?
As you engage in multidisciplinary research efforts across countries, you need to enter your information repeatedly into online databases and information systems. How can you speed up this mundane form-filling process?
Here comes ORCID to the rescue! ORCID (Open Research and Contributor Identifier) is a non-profit, community-based initiative aimed at creating unique identifiers for researchers across organizations, disciplines, and geographies. Launched in October 2012, all researchers are encouraged to participate and have themselves registered free of cost.
On registering, you will get a unique 16-digit numeric identifier. This number will be linked to your research work and achievements, and ensure that only you get credit for all your work. To put it simply, no two Zhang W’s can be mistaken to be the same person.
As more and more researchers register with ORCID, the identifier numbers will help you locate other experts in the field or specific researchers anywhere in the world. What’s more is that over 300 publishers, funding agencies, and other research-related organizations, including the American Physical Society, Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, etc., have already registered with ORCID as launch partners. This means that all data required for grant applications and resume upkeep will be easily retrievable with a few clicks, and you needn’t re-enter this data every time. Citation upkeep will become easy, and through ORCID,
you can even direct your publications to your target databases and repositories, which will greatly reduce your mundane tasks. Your ORCID record can be synchronized with other networking and collaboration systems.
How do you register? You can register for an ORCID identifier through a cost-free and quick process at http://www.orcid.org. Once you’ve registered, you can create your record by entering your affiliation details, grants, and patents to your name, etc.; retrieving your publication data from the CrossRef database; or synchronizing data with other systems such as ResearcherID or Scopus. Alternatively, if you choose to have your employer register on your behalf, you will simply need to validate your record.
Although ORCID is meant to be an open registry with information about your research activities that you would like to make public, you can control your privacy settings and decide how much of your profile you would like to share.
To sum up, ORCID is an exciting new initiative that will serve as the way forward to creating a global integrated research community where researchers can reach out to each other, collaborate better, and transcend barriers of discipline and geography.
So what are you waiting for? Register today!
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