Q&A: ORCID Executive Director Laurel Haak

ORCID Executive Director Laurel Haak, who earned her PhD in neuroscience from the Stanford School of Medicine, explains how the ORCID system can benefit researchers in the following Q&A with SfN.

SfN: What is an ORCID identifier and why should an SfN member register?

ORCID is a unique identifier for managing an individual’s research activities, ensuring you receive credit for your professional contributions. Whether you share your name with others, have changed your name, have authored work under variations of your name, or have a name expressed in multiple languages, your unique identifier distinguishes you from others and connects you with all of your research contributions.

Registration is free and takes less than 30 seconds. We provide tools to link to your existing papers, datasets, grants, and affiliations — and to propagate these linkages in large indexes including Scopus and Web of Science. The ORCID Registry supports multiple languages and character sets for both search and data entry, and your ORCID iD and associated data travel with you as you move from organization to organization.

ORCID ensures you get credit for your work. Your unique ORCID iD can be attached easily to your existing research contributions, such as papers, protocols, datasets, articles, presentations, and patents in workflows that researchers use on a regular basis, including grant applications, manuscript or abstract submissions, thesis completions, and data uploads. When you include your ORCID identifier in these workflows, it creates a validated connection between you and your work.  It also means that others can find your work more easily.

ORCID iDs can also be used to reduce the amount of data you need to type into forms. Why type in a bibliography if the data can automatically be pulled into the form using your ORCID iD?

SfN: How will ORCID help the neuroscience community as a whole?

Neuroscientists contribute a great deal to the research and discovery process. ORCID is working with publishers to ensure that ORCID iDs are collected and published with your papers — and that the publication repositories that many scientists use are searchable by ORCID iD. We are working with repositories to enable the collection of ORCID iDs when datasets, protein structures, and genetic sequences are deposited, ensuring that your contributions become citable. We are working with publishers to enable recognition of your peer review activities, and we support the Resource Identification Initiative to make locating the resources needed to carry out an experiment easier, supporting the scientific goal of reproducibility.

SfN: I already have an International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). Is that related to ORCID? Should I have both?

ORCID is a hub that links together identifiers for researchers, your supporting organizations, and your work. ORCID and ISNI are collaborating organizations. You can link your ORCID iD to your ISNI and your other author identifiers, such as Researcher ID and Scopus Author ID, using free tools available through the ORCID Registry.

SfN: What are ORCID’s future plans?

We are working with funding organizations, associations, and universities to support the linkage and citation of research activities, including peer reviews, meeting presentations, research software, and datasets. We’d love to hear your ideas!