ORCID and publishing at the Society for General Microbiology

Posted on February 12, 2014   by Rachel Walker

Researchers these days have to wear a lot of hats. From teaching to lab work, from writing grant proposals to writing research articles, they have a lot to do. At the Society for General Microbiology, we are keen to make the all-important process of publishing a research article as simple as possible.

One programme that we have recently partnered with is ORCID. The ORCID initiative allows researchers to register a unique researcher ID, which they can use across a number of applications to link their research activities and outputs. Researchers can connect their research output from the original publication to listings on Scopus or LinkedIn.

Having an ORCID identifier can also simplify the process of submitting an article to a Society journal. Our online submission system, Bench>Press, now allows a submitting author to add an ORCID identifier for themselves and any co-authors. The automated data delivery system that ORCID has in place enables it to partner with many organisations. This allows secure system-to-system communication and authentication, meaning that an author need only add their ORCID identifier, and all other available details (email address, affiliation details, etc.) will be completed automatically.

Looking forward, the Society is also investigating the option to ‘downstream’ these details to the final published article. This means that readers will be able to click through from an author’s name on an article directly to their other research outputs that are indexed through ORCID.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on using ORCID when publishing. If you have an ORCID ID, do you think the above initiatives would benefit you when submitting to a journal? And if you don’t have an ORCID ID, why not? Let us know by leaving a comment below this post or feel free get in touch via email.