ScienceOpen joins ORCID initiative

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a community-based effort to provide a registry of unique and persistent researcher identifiers, and through this links to research activities and outputs. It is a powerful tool for both researchers and institutions, and can be easily integrated with CrossRef, PubMed Central, Scopus, and other data archives to populate researcher records.

At ScienceOpen, we have always supported the use of ORCID within our services. Membership at ScienceOpen can be updated directly using your ORCID profile, providing seamless integration of the two. To comment, review and rate articles, we require an ORCID along with membership at ScienceOpen. If you have more than 5 articles within your ORCID profile, you’ll gain Expert member status with us, and free reign of services!

This month, ORCID have announced a partnership with several major publishers to now require an ORCID in their publication workflows. With this, author ORCIDs become embedded within article metadata, and are collected and automatically updated via CrossRef and the ORCID API for greater ease. Publishers joining the initiative agree to conform to a set of minimum standards of implementation.

The first publishers to sign this initiative include are The Royal Society, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Press, the American Geophysical Union, IEEE, Hindawi, and the Science journals. They have all signed on January 1^st 2016, but so far the only effective dates of requirement have only been implemented by The Royal Society (Jan 1^st 2016) and eLife (Jan 7^th 2016).

Aside from these first signatories who spearheaded the initiative, ScienceOpen was the first other publisher to join, with CEO Stephanie Dawson co-signing on the day of the new announcement. You might notice something a little odd about the effective date of requirement for ScienceOpen, which is back-dated to May 2014. This is because ORCID integration has been at the heart of our publishing system since our inception, demonstrating that ScienceOpen was already thinking way ahead of the curve for the future of publishing. We are happy to see other major publishers following our lead on ORCID integration, and look forward to seeing others join in the future*.

For more information on these new requirements, and some of the benefits they bring to researchers, see this post on the Royal Society’s blog by their Publishers, Phil Hurst, and this Q&A with Stuart Taylor, Publishing Director of the Royal Society on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

*JMIR Publications, Grupo Cominicar Ediciones, and Military Technical Courier have all since joined the initiative.