As researchers and scholars, you face the ongoing challenge of distinguishing your research activities from those of others with similar names. You need to be able to easily and uniquely attach your identity to research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks. Even if you have a common name, adding your ORCiD iD to all your publications, funding proposals and learned society profiles will establish your identity in a way that computer networks understand.
Unlike full-text services like academia.edu or JMU Scholarly Commons, you will populate your ORCID profile with only metadata about your scholarly activities, thus avoiding copyright and licensing stipulations, though you can and should create links to the full-text download sites.
Increasing numbers of publishers like Nature Publishing Group, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, database aggregator sites like Scopus and Web of Science, and funding agencies like the National Science Foundation are either requesting or requiring authors or applicants to “sign in” with an ORCiD iD. Correlatively, increasing numbers of online journals, like Genetics in Medicine, Plant Cell, and Cultural Anthropology are publishing ORCiD iD links along with author names. Scopus supports author searching by ORCiD iD.
You exercise complete control over every word of your ORCiD profile. You can create reciprocal links between other researcher identifiers that you “own” like your Google Scholar profile and ResearcherID, or your personal website, significantly enhancing “search engine optimization” for you and your works. You can set any part of your ORCiD as private, thought we encourage you to exploit your ORCiD fully by accepting the default “public” setting for the entire profile. Add your ORCiD iD to your digital signatures, and you are exploiting Linked Data technology to promote your academic career.