Linking ORCID Identifiers to eRA Profiles to Streamline Application Processes and to Enhance Tracking of Career Outcomes

Enter once, reuse often. That’s the mantra of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identification), a non-profit organization that promotes the use of its unique digital identifier to connect researchers with their science contributions over time and across changes of name, location and institutional affiliation. It’s a mantra that ties in well with NIH’s goal of finding ways to reduce the administrative burden on investigators of entering the same information in multiple places when applying to different funding agencies. It’s what propelled NIH and other agencies to develop a tool, SciENcv, to enable researchers to enter their biosketch data in one place and propagate it to multiple places. A researcher can also start the biosketch in SciENcv with information from his or her ORCID profile (see YouTube demo), thanks to a neat integration between the two tools. But more on SciENcv later. ORCID benefits researchers by providing a lifelong identifier that automatically links them to their past and recent papers, avoids the confusion caused by similar last names, enhances the discoverability of their papers and simplifies creating biosketches for grant applications (as evidenced in SciENcv). The identifier also allows agencies like NIH to better monitor professional outcomes by tracking the progress of researchers along their career path, starting with trainees and early career scientists. By leveraging the information available via ORCID, we can be more confi...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike eRA Commons ORCID Source Type: funding