NIH All About Grants Podcast: Growing ORCIDs

David Kosub >> Trainees and fellows have known this for a very long time. To grow a successful scientific career supported on NIH grants, you need to plant some ORCIDs. But what does this mean for the other scientists supported on NIH grants? Well, in this episode of the NIH All About Grants podcast, we're going to be talking all about ORCID's and what you should know. I promise there won't be any more dad jokes�probably

David Kosub Live from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. This is all about grants.

David Kosub >> All right. Well, welcome to the show. My name is David Kosub, and I am with the NIH Office of Extramural Research. And I'm glad to say that we have with us Doctor Bart Trawick He is the head of the customer services section within the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine. And he's going to tell us everything we wanted to know about ORCIDs. And as part of this discussion, it's important to know that come May 2025, all senior, key, senior and key personnel on an NIH grant will have to have an ORCIDid linked to their eRA Commons profile. Bart, welcome to the show.

Bart Trawick >> Thank you. David, I'm happy to be here.

David Kosub >> So what is an ORCID and where do they come from?

Bart Trawick >> Great. So no more corny jokes, right? I'll save that for later.

David Kosub >> No. Bring them. Bring them on for me.

Bart Trawick >> Um, an ORCID is a persistent identifier, and any researcher can register for one of these. It's free. Um, it comes from ORCID and ORCID is an organization. The acronym stands for Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier. So this organization is interested in providing identifiers for researchers to connect them to their works transparently and freely.

David Kosub >> And why are they important? I mean, why should a principal investigator get one?

Bart Trawick >> Oh, there's several reasons. Um, there's, you know, I'll. I'll start at the top is if you have, for example, a common name. Um, you know, this is a great way to kind of help separate you from the rest of the John Doe's or Jane Doe's. Um, it makes it very easy to find you and find all of your works. Um, that's just one of the reasons. Another reason might be if you've had a name change. So, um, I've gotten married, and you change your name, and or your name was different when you were in graduate school, and you want to kind of connect all of that, uh, wonderful work that you've done throughout your career. And an identifier can help with that. Um, they are commonly used now in the publishing industry, particularly in scientific publishing. So many journals now will have a field. When you submit your manuscript. You can also submit the ORCID identifiers for all of your coauthors on your manuscripts so that they can all receive attribution for that work.

David Kosub >> Well, thank you for that. Well, then, like since they're important and we're going to be requiring them for senior and key personnel, you know, can you tell us perhaps where they are integrated into an application? like I assume in like the scienCV?

Bart Trawick >> Yeah, absolutely. So in scienCV, this is, um, a product that helps applicants that are applying for an NIH grant or grants from other agencies as well. We have integration with ORCID. So if you have an existing ORCID ID you've gone to ORCID, you've registered, you have that identifier. You can leverage that in ScienCV in several different ways. First of all, you can use it to sign in to scienCV. So when you register for an ORCID you use a username and password to access that system. and you can use that same authentication pathway to get into ScienCV. Um, once you do that, when you register for your ORCID, you sign in through ORCID and you enter in to ScienCV. Now you've kind of connected that identifier with your ScienCV account. And we recognize that. And then we'll automatically put that identifier onto the forms that ScienCV produces, which are biographical sketches and current and pending other support forms. So we'll automatically put your ORCID identifier on there. But wait, there's more. Um, the ORCID um, is actually a profile system. So when you register for ORCID you get that identifier. But within the ORCID website you're able to explain where you went to school and where you had jobs and a lot of the works that you've published. So if you've ever filled out a biographical sketch for a grant, this might start sounding familiar to you, like, hey, that's a lot of the information that is required for these biographical sketches. So within ScienCV, if you've linked ORCID ID and you enter into ScienCV, you can use that information that is in your ORCID profile to pre-populate the forms. So when you're ready to fill out your latest and greatest grant application and you're putting together your biographical sketch, you can pull that information right into Syncd and it will pre-populate the forms.

David Kosub >> Definitely hear that. It's it's great to hear that it's going to pre-populate some of these forms that hopefully will reduce a lot of time and effort that people will spend, you know, applying for, you know, for funding. And I assume that this also is effective or helpful for when you apply for other funders, if they're also using ORCID IDs or for some of our systems are aligned, that they can pre-populate or provide information for other funders.

Bart Trawick >> That's exactly right. So NIH is not the only funder that is interested in in adopting these identifiers for their the researchers. There's other agencies that are also exploring this. The National Science Foundation and several other agencies. And so then you can begin to see, like if you have a single identifier, it makes it much more transparent and easy to figure out who is who, especially when they're going to different funding agencies to apply for grants. And ScienCV does currently support, um, these forms for grant applications to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as Department of Education. And now that the federal government has begun to standardize on a common format for the biographical sketch, other agencies are now coming to us. So you're going to see an expansion over the next year of additional agencies and will be supporting their biographical sketches as well. So then ScienCV is sort of your one stop shop for filling these forms out for additional Agencies.

David Kosub >> So as the customer services person, you must be the one stop shop for questions. So if researchers have any questions like who do they go to? How can they find more information about ORCIDs and as it relates to NIH?

Bart Trawick >> Sure. We have a help desk, and we've been working with ORCIDs now for over ten years. They were one of the first information systems that were interested in partnering with us. So we have a long, extensive history with ORCID, and we have a team that can answer all of your questions. And so feel free to to write into our help desk. Our staff is is more than happy to help you out. ORCID also has a fantastic website. It's very accessible. It's easy to use. It has a lot of information on there. Um, so you can go to either place to find out everything you want to know about ORCID identifiers.

David Kosub >> Definitely. Good to hear that you all have been working with them for for a long time, so probably know all of the answers. Uh, Bart, this has been great to learn more about ORCIDs and how people can find help as it relates to figuring out how to do ORCIDs and what they might mean. You know, I always like to leave the opportunity for a guest to provide. Any final thoughts? Do you like to leave the audience with any any important tidbits about ORCIDs that are relevant to here?

Bart Trawick >> I do have a couple thoughts. Number one, it's really easy to register for this and it's free. So anyone at any time can go over to ORCID and register for one of these identifiers and start to use it right away. It's going to help you as you publish your papers. You know, I have a personal anecdote now, I was saying that publishers are now accepting these ORCID identifiers as you submit your manuscripts. And a couple summers ago, I did have a manuscript I submitted with some coauthors. I included my ORCID ID, you know, a couple months go by, ORCID alerted me and said, hey, your manuscript is going to be published, and here's the citation. And it added it automatically to my ORCID profile before the publisher even notified me. So ORCID is really good at surveying the landscape of scientific literature and adding anything it sees with your ORCID identifier right into your profile. And once it's in there, you can use it in ScienCV. And then the final thing I'm going to say, David, you mentioned that NIH is going to begin requiring this in May. So I think this is a great time. You don't have to wait till May until you're forced to go. And oh, I got to go do this thing. Try it now and then. If you have any questions you can check out the ORCID website for help. You can contact our help desk. You're going to be way ahead of the game, and you're going to start enjoying the benefits much sooner than everybody else.

David Kosub >> Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us about ORCIDs. This has been great to learn more and to echo some points you made, you know, definitely reach out. If you have questions, touch base with the help desk. You know this is coming and it's going to be a requirement. So you know get started now. It'll be it'll help you out. This has been David Kosub with NIH�s all about grants. Thank you.