The BES journals require authors to include an ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you own and control, that distinguishes you from every other researcher and provides greater discoverability for your work. In this blog post, I explain how you can enable ORCID to automatically update and collect all your published work and datasets so you don’t have to manually keep your ORCID iD up-to-date.

Why have an ORCID ID?

An ORCID ID is a key part of your digital presence (your discoverability online) and is used to bring together your scientific records including publications, datasets, software, and other digital objects and content. Ensuring your work is well-connected and discoverable has many benefits, it increases citations of your work, enables connections with possible collaborators, improves Open Science practices, enables connections to researchers in other fields and facilitates researchers doing background or literature reviews on your work. Alongside these benefits many institutions, funders and Societies use ORCID iDs to track researchers work so it pays to keep your ORCID iD up to date!

Auto-updates to your ORCID iD

To get the benefits of your ORCID iD without the leg-work ORCID allows auto-updates from trusted sources. Auto-updates are key to achieving the ORCID mantra of enter once, re-use often.  The two key partners that you can grant permission for auto-updates are Crossref to allow your publications to be auto-updated and DataCite to allow your data sets to be auto-updated.

Crossref

The Crossref auto-update process is granted from a message within your ORCID Inbox. The request is sent to your ORCID Inbox after a publisher submits a new work to Crossref, with your ORCID iD embedded in the metadata. If you choose to grant long-lasting permissions, Crossref will then update your record automatically whenever a new work associated with your ORCID iD is found in their system – from any publisher.

DataCite

When viewing your ORCID ID click on ‘Works, → add some now → DataCite → authorize. To benefit from ORCID auto-update, you must also enable auto-update in your personal DataCite profile. Once it is enabled, whenever a data centre (such as Dryad, figshare or Zenodo) submits a new work to DataCite which has your ORCID iD embedded in the work metadata, DataCite will automatically add it to your ORCID record.

Acknowledgements

This blog was inspired by the talk by Shelley Stall at the 2019 Better Science through Better Data conference.