Helping Authors Organize Their Research: ORCID in the AGA Journals

Abstract

The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) journals Gastroenterology, Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology strive to stay on the cutting edge of the latest digital publishing technologies, especially those that are designed to improve the professional efforts of our authors. To that end, we are happy to announce the debut of our latest initiative, the implementation of ORCID. ORCID is an acronym for “Open Researcher and Contributor ID.” ORCID is a nonprofit organization that provides researchers with a unique digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that they can use to connect to their research contributions and affiliations. Launched in October 2012, the ORCID Registry offers a solution to the challenge of distinguishing yourself and your research from researchers with similar names, and connecting your various name formats (eg, John Smith, John K. Smith, John Kevin Smith). Creating an ORCID iD is fast, simple, and free of charge. It takes 30 seconds to register, and you only need to enter your name and e-mail address and create a password to get started. Privacy settings for your ORCID Record are in your control. Once established, just use your iD when you publish! You can connect your ORCID Record to your other identifiers such as Scopus AuthorID or ResearcherID to populate your professional information, or you can manually add content into such categories as education, employment, funding, and published works. In addition, you can grant permission to publishers, funders, and universities to automatically update your ORCID Record when one of your works is published, making it easier than ever for you to maintain an up-to-date home for your professional activities. ORCID ensures that you receive credit for your important research efforts while also making your work more discoverable. Through integration with publisher and funding workflows, ORCID makes it easier for you to attach your identity to your work, reducing the need for you to enter the same information time and time again. ORCID has seen rapid growth in the few years since its launch. To date, >1.3 million ORCID iDs have been created. Academic institutions such as the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, are helping their faculty, staff, and students create ORCID iDs, and institutions such as Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, now require that graduate students include an ORCID iD when submitting their thesis or dissertation. For research professionals, funders such as the National Institutes of Health support the use of ORCID iDs by grant applicants. In the scholarly publishing community, journals including Nature publish ORCID iDs of their authors, and publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, PLOS, Taylor and Francis, Springer, and Wolters Kluwer collect ORCID iDs for their authors. ORCID is fully integrated with Editorial Manager, the manuscript submission system used by the AGA journals, and we encourage our authors to add their iDs to their user accounts. You can easily achieve this either when you first create an Editorial Manager account, or by updating the current information you have in our system. You will be asked to log into your ORCID Record and authorize Editorial Manager to access your iD. The authorization process is a one-time step; once completed, Editorial Manager and your ORCID record are linked. The AGA journals also allow single sign-on using your ORCID credentials. Once your ORCID Record is linked to your Editorial Manager account (as described in the preceding paragraph), you can log into Editorial Manager at the sign-in page with your ORCID credentials, meaning you have one less user name and password to remember. The manuscript submission process also includes opportunities to add ORCID iDs for authors. The corresponding author can select ORCID iDs for co-authors when completing the “Add/Edit/Remove Authors” step of the submission process. Co-authors also have the option to submit and authenticate their ORCID iD after the corresponding author has completed the manuscript submission process. Co-authors receive an email asking them to verify contributing authorship on the manuscript. At this time, authors can click an embedded link to add their ORCID iD to the submission. Our ultimate goal for the AGA journals is to update author ORCID Records automatically when articles are accepted for publication. We hope our integration with ORCID is a useful tool for ensuring proper credit towards our authors’ publications and research efforts. Feedback is welcome and can be sent to [email protected] To find out more about ORCID and create an iD, visit http://orcid.org. The authors extend their sincere gratitude to Laurel L. Haak, PhD, Executive Director, ORCID and Laura Paglione, Technical Director, ORCID for their helpful suggestions and guidance in preparing and finalizing this commentary.