Rob Terry, TDR’s Knowledge Manager, explains why TDR now asks all its research partners to obtain their free unique ORCID iD for use in all grant and publication activities.
One of the biggest challenges for researchers, and those organizations that employ or fund their research, is linking all the grants, posters and publications produced over a career to the right person. The problem is that while we are all unique, it is rare that we are the sole user of our name.
For example, if you search Google for Rob Terry, you are more likely to read about the body building wrestler than find me (see photos) or my articles on open access. And it has caused some confusion at conferences when the wrong profile picture is used! Even within specialized publication databases, such as PubMed, I have papers authored R Terry, RF Terry, Robert F Terry etc. etc. and there are many other Terry authors out there all of them moving around the world and changing their email.
The good news is there is a simple, effective and free solution to this confusion by creating a unique and persistent identification using the ORCID iD website. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. Registration on their website takes less than a minute and once done you can use your iD to uniquely link all of your professional affiliations and content together. The ORCID site explains how it works and the benefits to researchers. One of the biggest benefits is that you can create your profile and publication list once and use it in many different sites.
Increasingly, research funders, such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust and universities, will ask for an ORCID iD at the application stage for a grant or promotion. In this case, you simply add your unique iD and the online forms are automatically populated with your academic profile and publication list. Many journals are also requiring the ORCID iD to prevent ambiguity among authors with the same names and maintain the contact details of the corresponding author even if they move to a different institution.
In TDR, with our focus on building research capacity, we have created the TDR Global networking platform that can track our research partners as their careers progress. Now that TDR is a member of the ORCID organization, users can enter their ORCID iD in their TDR Global profile. This allows for an automated search to retrieve all of their linked publications.
We look forward to seeing your profile grow on TDR Global, and with the unique ORCID iD, you will no longer have the difficulty of wrestling your research papers out of the internet.
Rob Terry, TDR Knowledge Manager and ORCID member: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3849-7705.
For more information, contact Rob Terry.