Why would I want to register with ORCID?

Question

I've noticed that in the ACM article document class you can now list authors' "ORCID" registration key.

I've not heard anyone mention that to me before. They Orcid website says:

ORCID provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. We provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations. We provide this service to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.

Whenever someone tells me they want to "enable trust" or that they're "trustworthy" I get suspicious...

So, is this about disambiguating researchers with the same first and last name without relying on their affiliation? Or is there something else to ORCID?

More specifically - if my name is rare and I don't expect there to be another academic with this same name in the foreseeable future - are there benefits for me in registering?

ORCID registration is a prerequisite to publication with some publishers. (So, a "benefit" is being able to publish with them...) — user2768, Dec 14 '17 at 14:40
The main benefit is to be able to update your information (website, affiliation, work experience, address, etc.) in one place instead of on dozen (for Computer Science, dblp, arXiv, dissem.in, etc., etc.). Many platforms will offer to pull your information from ORCID instead of asking you to fill (and update) everything by hand. — Clément, Dec 14 '17 at 14:48
There's several other ORCID questions on the site already; e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/56235/how-does-orcid-work?rq=1 https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45165/does-orcid-matter-for-a-person-who-would-like-to-work-in-academia?s=7|39.2624 https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4791/why-use-unique-digital-researcher-id?s=17|19.5343 Maybe you would like to take a look at them, and explain what parts of your question are still not answered? — Nate Eldredge, Dec 14 '17 at 14:49
@einpoklum No, the situation is not like that. The institutions / platforms I refered to previously have no interest whatsoever in developing a "standard" to link information to the profile of a researcher. — Clément, Dec 14 '17 at 14:52
Possible duplicate of Why using ORCID iDs instead of DOIs to identify researchers? — tjiagoM, Dec 14 '17 at 15:11
@tjiagoM: Actually, that's really n ot what I asked, but it is true that the combination of all answers about ORCID on Academia.SX sort-of answers my question. — einpoklum, Dec 14 '17 at 15:18
Why not? We have Scopus, Google Scholar, Researcherid, ... One more would not hurt. — Leon Meier, Dec 15 '17 at 02:11
I have recently found out that you can side-step the horrible registration process in each of the monstrous submission systems for each of the journals you either submit to or review in. Yes, more and more of them accept orcid for your login data now. — Oleg Lobachev, Jan 31 '20 at 20:17

score 16 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 14 '17 at 18:51

16

The advantages are:

Unique identifiability (as you noted, not everybody needs this).
Stability: There may be some other researcher with your name in ten year from now. Or you might change your name due to whatever reasons.
It's handy: Many editorial system allow you to log-in by just clicking "log in with ORCID". Some years ago I had zillions of log-in for different systems, often conflicting and I ended up requesting passwords frequently, delaying the submission of reviews. Now I use ORCID for everything and the problem is basically gone (sometimes I get invitations to review for journals I did not use before and they give a new log-in but I insist that they use my ORCID, and this works). For example several sites with the url editorialmanager.com allow you to sign in via ORCID. If you do so you do not a new log in and on top of that all your affiliation is already filled in after log in.
Your university library may be happy: When you use ORCID it is pretty easy for them to see how you publish with different journals/publishers and this may give them useful data for negotiations with publishers. You may have heard of the "Project Deal" where Germany is fighting with some publishers and it turned out that the data about the publications habits of German scholars is helpful in the negotiations (at least this is what our librarian told us).

Actually, I don't know of any competing standard and I do not see any downside in using ORCID. The organization behind ORCID is non-profit. I view ORCID as trustworthy and helpful as the arXiv (in case this means anything to somebody…).

edited Dec 14 '17 at 18:51

user2390246

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answered Dec 14 '17 at 15:50

Dirk

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Well, I guess it sees more use in some disciplines than others, since nobody has ever asked me for my ORCID, even as an option, or suggested I search by ORCID. But +1. – einpoklum Dec 14 '17 at 15:53
I think many (all?) Journals managed with scholarone allow orcids. – Dirk Dec 14 '17 at 15:55
One downside is having yet another account to manage. – user2768 Dec 14 '17 at 15:59
1

@user2768 Well, somehow, but it actually replaces a lot of other accounts, so this is not really a downside. – Dirk Dec 14 '17 at 16:59
@Dirk it might eventually replace other accounts, but I don't think it has yet. – user2768 Dec 14 '17 at 17:04
It has already (see my answer). – Dirk Dec 14 '17 at 17:39
@Dirk: I've never published anything in ScholarOne nor even encountered publications having to do with it. – einpoklum Dec 14 '17 at 21:34
further potential downside: while they seem to have some privacy setting (I wasn't aware of this while signing up by myself), their entire "public" data can be conveniently downloaded from their ftp server. This contains nicely machine-readable data, including emails, and personal career information (inferable employment status...), which could be combined with other data about you,... – tsttst Dec 15 '17 at 00:06
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I would add that even if your name is unique, ORCID can help mitigate problems with misspelling or encoding errors (e.g. some databases strip non-ASCII characters). It also mitigates problems with nicknames and name changes. – Maggie Dec 15 '17 at 18:36
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@tsttst Individuals have complete control of all the data within an ORCID record. If they wish for information to be private (and therefore not in the public data dump) then it stays private. User data control is a fundamental feature of ORCID. – tom Jan 03 '18 at 11:01

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 31 '20 at 19:13

4

The usage of ORCID identifiers (a unique and persistent identifier of the researchers and contributors) will "increase author's visibility and interoperability between a wide range of information services", but also will help to distinguish yourself!