The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) was one of the first federal organizations to embrace and champion the ORCID concept; the National Institutes of Health is the other. As yet, there are very few DOE authors sending ORCID IDs to OSTI's databases.  OSTI is encouraging Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP) representatives across DOE to, in turn, encourage authors at their labs and offices to sign up for an ORCID.  Anyone desiring more information about OSTI's participation in ORCID can contact OSTI's Point-of-Contact for ORCID, Jannean Elliott.

This SciTech Connect Record has an example of an author with an ORCID ID. If you select this author’s name on the citation screen, you will be given the choice of searching the author's name in SciTech Connect, searching the author's ORCID number in SciTech Connect, or searching the author’s ORCID number at orcid.org for other publications from the author not found in SciTech Connect. While ability to search SciTech Connect by ORCID ID is now available, the search by ORCID number won’t yield many results until we get a significant number of DOE authors registered with ORCID IDs.

ORCID’s potential to be useful as a vehicle for connecting journal articles to technical reports is of particular interest to OSTI.  This is a long-standing challenge for publishers of scholarly journals, as well as for federal agencies that produce technical reports.  For DOE national laboratory contracts, OSTI will rely upon ORCIDs to enable linking between journal articles and associated technical reports. Unlike a grant number, there is no number that uniquely identifies a lab project. While OSTI’s internal reports system captures contract numbers, such numbers cover multiple projects and do not enable linking between the version of record or accepted manuscripts (VOR/AM) and related reports. This method for linking can be aided by “fuzzy” matching based on titles and other metadata to identify related articles/reports.

In October 2012, the ORCID registry was opened, allowing researchers to register for ORCID IDs and link their works to their ID.  The system is still in the early stages of development and there is still a lot of functionality to be developed.  Registering for an ORCID ID at http://orcid.org/ is quite simple and takes less than a minute.  Once you have registered, you have the option of adding your works and biographical info to your record.  Coming soon you will be able to add affiliations, grants, and patents.   To aid in updating your works, ORCID automatically searches your name in the CrossRef database and presents you with a list of articles from which you can choose those that belong to you.  There is also an option to manually add works that may not have been included in the search results.  In addition to issuing unique author identifiers, ORCID will also enable linking to existing author identifier services such as Scopus Author ID and ResearcherID.

ORCID currently has close to 340,000 live ORCID IDs.  81,000 ORCID IDs are linked to at least one work with a total of over 2.2 million works linked to ORCID IDs.

While one would expect that the types of works listed in the ORCID Author record to include books and articles, ORCID has a very expansive list of over fifty works or publication types that you can choose from, including cartoon comic, encyclopedia article, live performance, photographs, raw data, and web site. Clearly, ORCID wants to insure that authors can claim ownership of their entire creative output.

To get a better understanding of ORCID, I decided to go ahead and register myself.  It was very easy and I was done in about thirty seconds.  My ORCID ID is 000-0002-8766-5421. This almost feels like getting a new Social Security Number.  Once registered and logged in to ORCID, I manually entered some of my publications, which you can see here.  I was impressed with the service and am now anxiously awaiting the implementation of new functionality over the next several months.