ORCID & Its HKU Implementation

Abstract

ORCID is a game changer. Up to now, those who do research and those who manage and use research have struggled mightily with proper individual identification in publications, patents, grants, architectural prizes, educational objects and more. The many problems of identity management are further exacerbated when dissimilar Chinese (漢字 Hanzi) names are transliterated into Roman homonyms and homographs. To solve these problems ORCID has sought and received buy-in from individuals, publishers, aggregators, funders and others. The University of Hong Kong (HKU) Libraries were part of the ORCID Technical Working Group from the beginning. Using ResearcherID, a precursor to ORCID, they created and populated ResearcherIDs for all HKU faculty. With this experience, and with newly downloaded and manually disambiguated publication data from Scopus for each HKU faculty member, HKU is now creating and populating ORCIDs for each member, on an “opt-out” basis. The HKU University Research Committee will soon direct all members to use their ORCIDs when submitting publications, applying for grants, etc.