ORCID frequently asked questions

You have full control over your ORCID profile, what it contains and what is publicly visible.

Once you have registered, the minimum information visible will be your name and your ORCID iD. However you can choose to make more information visible, such as your publications, education and employment history.

Your publication list will grow as ORCID locates articles from the sources you identify. You can also create a manual record for anything that might not be imported automatically, for example from publishers that have not yet integrated with ORCID.

For new works added to ORCID you can change the privacy settings from your Account Settings.

The visibility settings for your publications can be edited individually or all at once using the Bulk edit feature:

Yes, you can delete it at any time from your Account settings.

We do, however, encourage you to keep your ORCID iD as increasing numbers of publishers are integrating the ORCID system into their submission systems, and funders are recommending the use of ORCID as a unique identifier for researchers.

The ORCID iD is a 16-digit number randomly assigned by the ORCID registry.

An example ORCID identifier would have the following structure: 0000-0001-5109-3700. It can be expressed as a URL like this: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5109-3700

When applying for a grant or submitting an article for publication with a funder or publisher that has integrated with the ORCID registry. You can also add it to your CV, business cards or personal website.

If you have already joined ORCID please add your identifier to Symplectic (see "how do I add my ORCID iD to Symplectic?"). We also encourage you to add your Imperial email address to your ORCID profile.

For staff included in the ORCID Project we sent information on your publications from Symplectic to ORCID. We encourage you to make this information public in ORCID.

If you are a student or new member of staff creating an ORCID iD you can populate your profile by importing a BibTeX file. ORCID can also import articles from Scopus, Europe PubMed Central and CrossRef, among others.

We are working with Symplectic so that ORCID automatically receives information from Symplectic too.

Your ORCID iD goes with you; it is not tied to a particular institution.

ORCID have a blog and a newsletter you can subscribe to for updates.

We will also do our best to tell you about important developments on the link between Symplectic and ORCID.

ORCID is a non-profit, community-led organisation. Imperial College London is a member, like many other research organisations.

You can find out more about ORCID as an organisation, the funders who have integrated with the ORCID registry and all the other universities who have become ORCID members on the ORCID website.

The ORCID project at Imperial College London ran during 2014 and resulted in the creation of over 3000 ORCID iDs for academic staff.

You can find out more at The ORCID Project.

You can add your ORCID iD to Symplectic by configuring ORCID in the My Data Sources section of the homepage.

Once you have added your ORCID iD, Symplectic can read your ORCID record and add publications that you claimed there to your Symplectic profile during regular trawling of data sources.

To avoid duplicates Symplectic does not currently push data to ORCID, but we are working with Symplectic to make this feature available in the future.

In some cases Symplectic only requested the right for temporary read access to your ORCID account.

If you have been affected you will see a reminder under My Data Sources to reconnect with ORCID.

Reconnecting will take care of this problem. If you do not see the error message the connection works fine.

In rare cases it may be possible that ORCID users with certain special characters in their passwords, like exclamation marks, receive an error message when logging in to ORCID via Symplectic.

If you receive a "bad username/password" error or similar, simply open a new tab in your browser and log in via https://orcid.org/signin.

There seems to be an issue with Internet Explorer when adding ORCID to Symplectic.

You should be able to get around this by temporarily disabling IE add-ons.

How to do this varies depending on your operating system, but you may be able to right click on the IE icon and then choose Start without add-ons, or go to Start> Programs> Accessories> System tools> Internet Explorer (no add-ons).

If, by following this procedure, you can log in to ORCID then one of your add-ons is likely to be corrupt.

Please send any queries or feedback to orcid@imperial.ac.uk

Caution: Auto-claiming publications in Symplectic

‘Ignoring’ an ID - for example, a SCOPUS ID means that publications associated with the ID will come in as ’Pending’ articles.

Rejecting an ID means this ID is *not you*, but someone else. Symplectic uses this confirmation to automatically reject publications.

You should therefore ‘Ignore’ any IDs, but reject those that are definitely *not you*.

If you accept a Scopus ID, then choose ‘Auto suggest publications’ so you are able to control the claiming of publications. To access this option use ‘Manage’ to access the pop-up box – see below.