Easy as 1, 2, 3...

I know what I am interested in, and I know what I am passionate about, but seldom do these coincide with things that others are interested in and passionate about.  Except ORCID.

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) is something that seems to resonate with a whole bunch of people, from hard core researchers to administrators and librarians.  For those that are saying "but what do flowers have to do with researchers?", ORCID is a way to disambiguate researchers, especially those with similar sounding names.  By giving each researcher a unique number, they can then go and 'tag' their research publications, data, grants, and many other research outputs as theirs.  It is like the grand-daddy of researcher identifiers.  And it has landed in a big way.

However, I get the feeling that ORCID is more popular with research administrators than with the researchers themselves.  There are a multitude of reasons why research institutions can benefit from ORCID (streamlining processes, reporting on research undertaken,identifying research resulting from grants awarded to staff, etc), but the benefits to researchers are not as obvious.  Sure, being about to differentiate between the various "Tim Smiths" that work at the institution would be nice, but what else?  What is there that drives the researcher to maintain their ORCID profile?

I recently read an article by The Research Whisperer that sums this up nicely, and I created a sketch note about it.  And I must say, speaking as someone that rarely gets a like or retweet on Twitter, this has gone galactic!  It has definitely hit a chord with many people who work either in research or around research.  It is a credit to the author of the article (Jonathan O'Donnell) for writing such a wonderful piece.

Some of the comments I have received via Twitter include:

@BecOwen74, Just made my day. Thanks! (from @jod999)

 I love this summary of ORCID from the Research Whisperer. This image makes its uses very straighforward (from @Ashley_UQL)

Get your research & profile out there - for all academics, postdocs, PhD students.  Love the graphic! (from @LareenNewman) 

And to top it off, the author even included it in his blog post on The Research Whisperer!

How chuffed am I!!

So, without further ado, here is my sketch note.  I hope you enjoy.