ORCID grant enables Purdue Libraries to connect scientists to their research

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — Purdue University Libraries is helping connect scientists to their research by participating in ORCID, a nonprofit organization that registers researchers' identities and links them across different systems that manage scholarly information.

The connection associates researchers with their publications, grants and patents. ORCID also helps researchers, especially those with common names, to get appropriate credit for use of their work.

For example, ORCID can enable people to search for the published work of a specific individual named "John Smith" without the ambiguity of different spellings or mixing up works from other authors who have the same name.

ORCID is working with major research institutions, funding agencies, publishers, and professional societies to establish and link identities across different systems and publications.

It is free for researchers to register for an ORCID identifier and associate it with their publications, grants, and patents. Researchers own their identifiers, which they keep for their entire academic career as they move from one institution to another.

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Purdue Libraries will encourage adoption of ORCID by integrating it into HUBzero, an open source software platform that was developed at Purdue for creating dynamic websites that support scientific research and educational activities.

"Integrating ORCID with HUBzero will enable hundreds of thousands of hub users to register their identifiers and make it easier for people to find their scholarly output", said Michael Witt, an associate professor of library science, who is leading the effort at Purdue.

ORCID functionality will be piloted and tested on three hubs: the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), nanoHUB.org, and HABRI Central - and then become available to more than 50 other hubs in September 2014.

Source: Michael Witt, Purdue University Libraries, mwitt@purdue.edu