STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, joined with ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, to announce the official launch of the ORCID Registry. Elsevier, a founding sponsor and launch partner of ORCID, expects to integrate ORCID with many of its products and services.
ORCID seeks to remedy the systemic name ambiguity problems seen in scholarly research by assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output. ORCID will facilitate an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID, other ID schemes, and research objects such as publications, grants and patents.
At launch, researchers and scholars will be able to register for an ORCID identifier, create ORCID records, and manage privacy settings. They will also be able to link to and synchronise their ORCID identifier record data with external systems including Scopus, an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Researchers will be able to link to their Scopus Author Profiles from their ORCID records, saving them time when setting up their ORCID profile and allowing Scopus to automatically keep their ORCID bibliography up to date.
Next year, Scopus will incorporate ORCID data into the Scopus author profiling process to increase the accuracy of the Scopus profiles and automatically propagate work that researchers do to clean up their ORCID profiles.
In addition to the Scopus tool, ORCID data will be added to the SciVal suite of products, to further enhance the accuracy of researcher profiles, and enable increased interoperability with customers' own data. Elsevier's Publishing group also plans to integrate ORCIDs into the manuscript submission process. This is expected to save authors time when going through the submission process and enable automatic updating of author bibliographies when articles are published.
ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a persistent registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities to these identifiers. Starting in October, individuals may register for an ORCID identifier at http://orcid.org.
In a related announcement, scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced that once researchers have created their unique personal identifier at www.orcid.org, NPG is ready to include them in its manuscript submission system and nature.com registration. NPG is one of seventeen launch partners, including universities, funders, publishers, research information vendors and providers.
nature.com registrants will be now be able to link ORCID identifiers to their nature.com profile, and authors will be able to link their ORCID identifiers to their manuscript submissions. NPG will also be encouraging authors and registrants to register for an ORCID identifier at www.orcid.org. Further integration between nature.com, NPG's submission systems and the ORCID registry is planned as ORCID rolls out functionality.
