Just about everyone who reads or writes scholarly publications loves persistent identifiers (PIDs), especially the most well-known, DOIs, or digital object identifiers. DOIs make it easy to find and link to articles so that you know you’ve found and shared the right article every time. They also help prevent link rot, a common issue with reference lists that include scholarly material, especially documents that exist only on the open web and not in a database of scholarly publications. DOIs are created at the time of publication by an agency that has agreed to keep the URI (web address) where the document lives up to date, so that it can be found persistently, even when the location on the web changes.
DOIs have a clear role in the FAIR Data ecosystem, by ensuring that research results are findable and accessible (and sometimes interoperable and reusable). Another thrilling persistent identifier is ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCIDs should also persistently point to the same person, disambiguating them from others with a similar name, and providing up-to-date research and scholarly information about the person. However, there is an important difference: It is researchers themselves who must create the ORCID and keep the most essential information current. Once a researcher establishes their ORCID and provides it to publishers, they can match DOIs with new articles and automatically push publication data to ORCID. This can lift some of the burden of keeping curricula vitae (CVs) up to date – and also partially automate the creation of biosketches.
However, there are two more benefits to adopting ORCIDs. One is the very concrete role they can play in university strategies for compliance with NSPM-33 (National Security Presidential Memorandum 33) which was issued by the National Science and Technology Council in January 2021, for implementation to take place in ensuing years. NSPM-33 doesn’t mention ORCID by name, but it does require researchers to have a “digital persistent identifier.” Although there are competitor websites that provide scholarly profiles, ORCID has emerged as the preferred researcher identifier. ORCID is designed and governed as a PID to be implemented in information systems, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln has an institutional membership that will support us in doing so.
But the other, and in my view, more significant, reason to adopt ORCID is about meeting the historical moment. ORCID disambiguates researchers, provides information about their institutional contexts, and allows aggregation of their scholarly record. As access to data and research outputs is threatened, recommitting to openness and transparency is an important bulwark against efforts to short circuit established practices for trustworthy and ethical science.
If you’d like assistance with registering your ORCID, including learning about privacy options and some shortcuts to populating your profile, please contact us.