ORCID Adoption & Integration at CU Boulder

What is ORCID?

ORCID’s vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time (https://info.orcid.org/what-is-orcid/).

Why ORCID?

  • It is currently very difficult to:
    • Track different forms of an individual researcher’s name across systems;
    • Distinguish between different researchers with the same name;
    • Identify all scholarly works associated with a particular researcher.
  • These difficulties may lead to faculty not receiving attribution for the full range of their scholarly contributions. ORCID attempts to solve this problem by creating unique faculty ids that can be linked to existing identifiers as well as things like journal publisher manuscript submission systems, funding agency grant application workflows, and other tools.
  • Unlike other identifier systems, ORCID is open and community-driven, and reaches across disciplines, geographic regions, and types of content held by publishers, journals, and funding agencies to include all types of scholarly works (e.g., articles, books, data sets, grants, software, etc.).

Who is using ORCID?

  • ORCID has been adopted and integrated by hundreds of universities, funding agencies, publishers, data repositories, and others. See here for a list of organizations that are actively implementing ORCID: https://orcid.org/members

How is CU Boulder implementing ORCID?

  • Initially, CU Boulder created ORCID iDs for all tenure-track faculty, instructors, clinical faculty and research faculty in two registrations during 2014 and 2016. If you were a faculty member at this time and want to know your ORCID iD, please contact ofafacultydata@colorado.edu.
  • At this time, CU Boulder is no longer registering ORCID iDs on behalf of faculty.  All faculty, students, and staff can register for an ORCID iD themselves for free on the ORCID website at http://orcid.org/.
  • ORCID iDs added to manuscripts or funding applications can result in publications being automatically claimed in CU Boulder Elements.
  • The Boulder campus will continue its efforts to gather information centrally and build central research networking systems such as CU Experts profiles and support for other campus networking systems. We will do whatever is feasible to share accurate and critical data across these systems. Faculty are not being asked to populate yet another profile though they may choose to do so if they desire. ORCID continues to build new functionality which may prove useful to our data sharing efforts in the future.
  • Faculty can also use their ORCID iDs in any of the rapidly growing number of systems operated by publishers, funding agencies, professional societies, and other institutions that have partnered with ORCID.
  • CU Boulder's ORCID project is a joint effort between the CU Libraries, OIT, and the Office of Faculty Affairs.

How do I get an ORCID iD?

  • If you are a current faculty member needing an ORCID iD, please register for an ORCID iD using your Colorado.edu email address at https://orcid.org/register. When you have received your ORCID iD, please add it to your CUBE profile.
  • As of October 2022: OFA is working with campus partners to streamline and improve our ORCID iD reporting system. We appreciate your patience as we rework how to have ORCID iDs show up in FRPA and CU Experts. In the meantime, please do add your ORCID iD to CUBE so you can enjoy the publication finding benefits of this author identifier.

ORCID iDs will:

  • Assist with more accurate attribution of publications to our faculty to support the widening efforts around recognition and research networking;
  • Help to identify scholarly works not traditionally available from automated sources such as data sets, software, some books and chapters, conference proceedings, creative works, etc;
  • Facilitate reporting requirements related to grant and manuscript submissions;
  • Increase researcher visibility as many publishers will provide a link to ORCID iD directly on the publication;
  • Assist with efforts to improve metrics associated with research impact by creating more accurate listings of researcher contributions;
  • Allow for retrospective connection to previously published scholarly works via other identifier systems (such as ResearcherID, Scopus ID, ISNI);
  • Allow faculty to collect their numerous research id codes in a central repository for their use and for support of campus research networking efforts.
  • ORCID iDs can help faculty and researchers highlight their academic reputation.  For more tips see "How Faculty Can Highlight Their Academic Reputation."

How to use your ORCID iD?

  • Include your ORCID iD on manuscript submissions to take advantage of automatic publication claiming in CU Boulder Elements. 
  • Include your ORCID iD on funding submissions whenever possible to help comply with funder mandates and enable future developments in campus systems.

More about ORCID:

  • ORCID iDs use the following format: 0000-0001-5109-3700
  • Each ORCID iD is also associated with an ORCID profile. Here is an example of an ORCID profile: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5109-3700
  • Everything in an ORCID profile other than the iD (which are always public) can be displayed publicly or privately as determined by the faculty member.
  • All content on an ORCID profile is controlled by the faculty member and is never sold to third party vendors.
  • Since ORCID launched in October 2012, over 5 million ORCID iDs have been registered to researchers around the world. Many institutions are currently joining ORCID as members supporting their researchers and integrating ORCID identifiers in campus systems.

ORCID in the News:

For more information on ORCID and the growing ORCID community please see: ORCID News

Questions?

Contact: ofafacultydata@colorado.edu