What is ORCID?
Researchers and scholars face the ongoing challenge of distinguishing their scholarly activities from the scholarly activities of others with similar names. They need to be able to easily and uniquely attach their identity to scholarly work, such as articles, citations, grants, patents and data sets. As individuals collaborate across disciplines and institutions, they must interact with an increasing number and diversity of information systems. Entering data over and over again can be time-consuming and often frustrating. ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to reduce that frustration.
ORCID provides a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. An ORCID iD is a persistent unique identifier that follows an individual throughout their career. The format of an ORCID iD looks something like “0000-0003-0423-208X.”
ORCID records hold non-sensitive information such as name, email, organization, and activities such as publications, grants, patents and other scholarly works. ORCID provides tools for individuals to manage data privacy.
Click here for additional information on ORCID’s vision, values and strategic plan.
Why get an ORCID identifier?
There are benefits to having Boston University initiate your ORCID record creation, or reporting an existing ORCID, as it paves the way for data exchange between BU and ORCID on behalf of each scholar.
Benefits of getting an ORCID iD include:
- Ensuring you get credit for your scholarly work
- Save time and reduce the effort of you having to identify your work to multiple systems and organizations
- Re-purposing information for re-use within citation repositories, BU Profiles, My CV, annual review & assessment, faculty web-sites, and more
- My CV and BU Profiles use ORCID to help with author disambiguation, eliminating issues with common names and name changes
- Increase discoverability of your research outputs
- For more, see Elsevier’s Ten reasons to get – and use – an ORCID iD.
Publisher integration: Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Nature and other major publishers have begun integrating ORCID iDs into the manuscript submission process and embedding ORCID identifiers across their scientific and scholarly research ecosystem. This will save authors time during submission and enable automatic updating of author bibliographies when articles are published. ORCID IDs are being pushed to publication repositories such as PubMed, tagged on each authors and linked back to their ORCIDs. Publications deposited by publishers into an ORCID can be pulled into BU systems, reducing the administrative burden on scholars to “report” the activity.
Grant submission integration: ORCID iDs have been integrated with the SciENcv platform for linking researchers, their grants, and their scientific output. NIH, AHRQ, and CDC announced that individuals supported by research training, fellowship, research education, and career development awards will be required to have ORCID iDs beginning in FY 2020. The US federal government is discussing plans to push research awards into ORCID.
What does the process entail?
Having Boston University initiate your ORCID record creation, or reporting an existing ORCID paves the way for data exchange between BU and ORCID on behalf of each scholar.
The first time you log in to the Boston University ORCID Interface application using your BU credentials, you will be given the options of creating or providing your ORCID identifier. After selecting one of these options, you will be redirected to the ORCID website where you will create or provide your ORCID identifier and allow permission for BU to access/update your ORCID record. You will be given the option of granting BU permission as a trusted organization, which you can revoke at any time. If you choose not to grant ongoing permission, BU access to your ORCID record will expire after one hour. To learn more about trusted organizations, click here. You can get additional information on ORCID visibility settings here.
After obtaining your ORCID identifier, individuals who are in BU Profiles will be given a link to the Transfer Data page. On the Transfer Data page you will be able to select BU Profiles information and transfer it to ORCID.
After the transfer completes, the inbox associated with your ORCID account will receive notification(s) that your ORCID record has been updated by Boston University. Click here for additional information regarding the ORCID inbox and configuring your notifications in ORCID Account Settings.
For those not in BU Profiles, or with no publication records showing in BU Profiles, you can opt to add works using alternative means, through the search & link wizard. Options include CrossRef Metadata search, ResearcherID, Scopus (even if you have never used Scopus before) and more. To use this option, sign in to ORCID. Choose the “Search & link” selection from the “Add works” dropdown menu in the Works section. From the Link Works menu, click the option you prefer (for example, “Scopus to ORCID”). Additional information on using the search and link wizard including a short video can be found here.
If you have questions for Boston University on this process, you can email orcid@bu.edu.
