EMBL aims to use ORCID iDs and records to showcase its scientific outputs. It is a significant goal for us as an organisation, and it also offers many advantages for you. Therefore, EMBL’s upcoming Open Science policy requires all staff who publish works (papers, data, software …) to get an ORCID iD and to ensure their ORCID record is updated.
Your full participation in the ORCID scheme will save you time and allow you to claim credit for your work. By taking part, you will be on the leading edge of an open, international initiative to resolve author disambiguation, which has recognition at its core and impacts deeply on the scientific community.
This important project can only work when it is embraced by the source of EMBL’s world-class reputation: You. Below we have summarised the most important information about the project, please do not hesitate to contact library@embl.de if you have any questions.
What is ORCID?
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a global, community-built, not-for-profit organisation sustained by fees from member organisations such as EMBL. It provides unique identifiers (“ORCID iD”) associated with an ORCID record for individual researchers. An ORCID iD is a persistent digital identifier that the researcher owns and controls, and that distinguishes them from every other researcher. Your ORCID iD is a powerful means to ensure you are unambiguously credited for your work, as it links your affiliations, articles, grants, patents and more.
See for example https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8314-8497
Who owns ORCID iDs?
Your ORCID iD is owned and controlled by you and issued by the ORCID Foundation. You are able to create, edit, and maintain an ORCID iD and record free of charge. You control the defined privacy settings of your own ORCID record data. However, we recommend that you at least make your EMBL affiliation and publication list publicly visible.
What ORCIDs at EMBL can do for you
Saving time and hassle
- If you maintain your publications list in your ORCID record, then you only need to do it in this one place.
- If you have a popular name, changed your name, or there are different spellings of your name, your ORCID iD will disambiguate the literature, ensuring that you can take credit for your own portfolio of work.
- As ORCID iDs become integrated with manuscript-submission and grant-application systems, the job of updating your ORCID record will become lighter, requiring only an occasional check.
- As ORCID iDs are becoming increasingly necessary to apply for certain grants or submit to certain journals, these applications and submissions will become quicker.
See more ORCID benefits for researchers.
How to get an ORCID iD
If you have not yet registered for an ORCID account, just visit orcid.org and follow the simple registration process. It’s free and only takes a minute.
ORCID also has some very informative videos to explain more about ORCID and how to set up your ORCID iD.
How to register your ORCID iD in EMBL
Please inform us about your ORCID iD by sending an email to library@embl.de. You should also enter your ORCID iD in your EMBL personal profile using the Admin services system (Tab Services/Employee Profile).
Your ORCID iD will then be visible on your staff page alongside your email address and telephone number.
How to update your ORCID account
It’s important that you update your ORCID record at least once a year and ensure that at least your EMBL affiliation and publication list is publicly visible. You can do this via Europe PMC, a database run by EMBL-EBI, which hosts peer reviewed articles, preprints, books and book chapters, and other publication types. The Literature Services Team has developed a tool that makes it easy to link records in Europe PMC to an ORCID. To do this:
- Go to https://europepmc.org/orcid/import and select ‘Start’
- Sign into ORCID
- A list of papers matching your author name search will be displayed. Papers already linked to you as an author have a green background. Select the checkbox next to other publications which are yours and select ‘Continue’
- Review the publications you have selected and ‘Send to ORCID’
If there is a work you published that you want to add to your ORCID record but is not available in Europe PMC, then you need to send the details to library@embl.de using this spreadsheet. The publications will be added to Europe PMC and then available for you to claim.
Why EMBL is using ORCID iDs
ORCID iDs can resolve many of the challenges inherent to managing and sharing our scientific outputs. The potential benefits are so significant that ORCID implementation is being extended across the whole of EMBL.
EMBL wants to use ORCID iDs to track and openly share publications across the entire organisation, working with Europe PMC to allow us to make reporting statistics and web pages around publications as automated and open as possible. To do this, it is important that every staff member or fellow with a publication record at EMBL has an ORCID iD.
EMBL needs to share the scientific outputs of its staff in a number of ways. In addition to displaying them on webpages, in reports and in reviews, EMBL must quantify outputs for its member states. These figures indicate how a country’s funding of EMBL has translated into tangible progress and value.
EMBL’s upcoming Open Science policy requires all staff who publish works (papers, data, software …) to get an ORCID iD and to ensure their ORCID record is updated at least annually with article publications, and preferably also data and software. Please ensure that at least your EMBL affiliation and publication list is publicly visible.
Good data and consistent reporting
EMBL must be confident that it is reporting the correct publication record for the entire organisation or individual groups of staff members (i.e. leaders, postdocs, curators, developers, students and trainers). This reporting goes well beyond the simple presentation of lists, and must answer questions such as: “To which articles have Spanish EMBL students contributed in the past five years?” and “How many Open Access articles have been published by researchers from EMBL Grenoble in 2021?”. Currently, these questions are (perhaps surprisingly) difficult to answer, as to do so requires coordination between several sources of information that are currently not linked in an unambiguous way. ORCID iDs address this problem directly.
We ask that you be personally responsible for keeping your ORCID record public and up-to-date. This will enable the reporting and publishing requirements for EMBL to become a lot easier and more accurate.
Once we have fully implemented ORCID iDs, EMBL will consider your ORCID record to be your publication record, and will use it as the source of information for all appropriate reports and publications.
FAQs
Do I need an ORCID iD?
EMBL’s Open Science policy requires all staff who publish works (papers, data, software …) to get an ORCID and to ensure their ORCID record is updated at least annually with article publications, and preferably also data and software.
Do I need an ORCID iD to apply for a grant or submit a publication?
Several funders strongly recommend or mandate use of ORCIDs. For example, since August 2015, Wellcome has required all lead applicants to provide an ORCID ID when completing an application form in WT Grant Tracker (with the exception of Engaging Science grant applications). Applicants who don’t have an ORCID ID can register for one via the ORCID website.
Additionally, for Horizon Europe grants, contributors should where possible be uniquely identifiable, and data uniquely attributable, through identifiers which are persistent, non-proprietary, open and interoperable (e.g. through leveraging existing sustainable initiatives such as ORCID for contributor identifiers).
The new UKRI policy makes ORCID identifiers a requirement for publishers and repositories where articles they have funded are published/deposited.
What kind of works can I claim to my ORCID record?
You can claim any kind of research outputs, including publications, data sets, conference presentations, grants, software, peer reviews, curation activities and many more.
You can manually add these data to your ORCID account, import them from other systems or add them using an identifier.
For more information see https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006973133-Add-works-to-your-ORCID-record
When should I update my ORCID record?
You should update your ORCID record at least once a year. In addition, it makes sense to update your profile whenever there are changes (e.g. new publications, new affiliations, etc.) or before conferences or applications for jobs, fellowships or grants, because the ORCID profile can serve as a public CV.
What privacy settings should I use for my ORCID record?
We recommend that you share your details as openly as possible. In any case it is necessary for EMBL´s reporting duties that you make at least your EMBL affiliation and publication list publicly visible.
What are the benefits of using ORCID compared to Google Scholar or ResearchGate?
ORCID iD is a persistent identifier which means it can be used by many different infrastructures and platforms, from publisher submission systems, to funder grant systems, to institutional research information systems or repositories and subject repositories like Europe PMC. Google Scholar and Researchgate offer author profiles but are proprietary systems, meaning your publication data cannot be accessed and integrated openly by other organisations or tools. Europe PMC offers open author profiles which are generated from your public ORCID record.
ORCID iDs are also machine readable, so they can be included in services such as the Crossref metadata service. Any website or repository ingesting metadata from Crossref can uniquely identify your publications. They can’t do this if you don’t have an ORCID iD and you only use a Google Scholar profile.
Google Scholar and ResearchGate are not committed to being open and sustainable. They could disappear tomorrow (although unlikely, Microsoft Academic Graph was recently ‘retired’ by Microsoft and left a lot of organisations who depended on it looking for open, public alternatives).
Google Scholar and ResearchGate rely on the author to ‘curate’ their publications and works. Whilst both platforms make this very easy, it is still work for the author. ORCID does require some manual curation by the author, but over time the ORCID auto updates mean your ORCID record can be updated automatically by ‘trusted’ organisations you have given permission to.