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Accidentally Hiding Behind Your ORCID iD? Change Your Privacy Setting to Power Up

Why do you need an ORCID iD? First, to enable others to find you and your work, and second, to automate funding, publishing, and other reporting requirements. Help ORCID work for you!

Privacy has justifiably become a major concern over the past several years, as access to Social Security numbers, bank accounts, credit cards, and social media accounts have been compromised. However, ORCID does not store any such non-public personal data. It is easy, however, to inadvertently constrain ORCID’s benefits by choosing an excessively restrictive privacy setting.

For example, many researchers choose the most restrictive Privacy setting, “Only Me.”

Icon for Only Me setting in ORCID
“Only Me” is visible to only you.

This returns the result “No public information available” in the ORCID Registry. This lack of any further information makes this record difficult to use for collaboration and promotion. To make yourself globally visible with details such as affiliation, CV, and contact information, and to take advantage of other ORCID services, set your Privacy to “EVERYONE.”

Icon setting for Everyone in ORCID
“Everyone” is visible to everyone.

For extensive details about privacy in the ORCID system, refer to the Privacy Policy 3.1 Privacy-Settings for Visibility & Sharing.

The advantages of an ORCID iD include:

  1. A rapid, reliable search for a researcher’s work product.
  2. An up-to-date, accurate, public professional record of achievement.
  3. Links with SCOPUS to quickly automate the publication update process. Also, streamlines other systems, such as Symplectic Elements used in Pitt’s Faculty Information System.
  4. Better disambiguation of researchers with same or similar names confirmed with affiliations and alternative names.
  5. Integration with My NCBI SciENcv to simplify writing and archiving biosketches for NIH and NSF.
  6. Integration with NIH eRA Commons to associate publications to grants. NOTE: NIH fellowship and individual career development award applications as of January 25, 2020 must include an ORCID ID.
  7. Join ScienceOpen.com! The ScienceOpen Network platform is integrated with ORCID.

For more information or assistance with ORCID, please contact Andrea Ketchum at ketchum@pitt.edu or 412-648-9757.

~Andrea Ketchum