The Research Councils announced last week that they have become members of the Jisc UK ORCID Consortium and that JeS will be ready to start capturing ORCID identifiers (ORCID iDs) in early 2016.

This news is the culmination of several years of engagement between the Research Councils and Jisc to understand how they can improve the flow of information across the higher education sector. In a joint Research Councils UK (RCUK) and JISC report published earlier this year, ORCID iD was identified as the leading standard for a researcher identifier.

Benefits to You as a Researcher

The ORCID iD gives a unique digital identity which can be kept throughout your career, allowing you to keep an on-going record of your scholarly activities even if you change research organisation or leave academia. In the short-term, an ORCID iD should ensure correct assignment of research outputs by allowing them to be unambiguously linked to their creators. It also increases the chances that a researcher’s work is discoverable. In the longer term, it should bring about efficiency improvements by saving time and duplication in grant applications and enhanced reporting of research outputs to funders as well as improved analysis of outcomes.

Further information about the benefits of using ORCID are outlined in the RCUK blog. The announcement on the Jisc website can be found here.