It’s #OAWeek and we’ll be introducing a set of key tools for researchers throughout the week. To kick it off we’re talking about researcher identifiers, specifically ORCiD.  These Identifiers – basically the essential descriptive metadata of a researcher – will be become increasingly important as open access evolves into a longer-term vision of open scholarship – a future that could be summed up as an interconnected, equitable, global scholarly ecosystem of well-curated, interoperable, trusted research articles, data and software supported by a diversity of open publishing models.

ORCiD, and other identifiers are now the key connectors of research to researchers. More than 7 million researchers globally have an ORCiD. Here, more than 2000 researchers have an ORCiD associated with QUT. We use it to link QUT researchers to their work in online systems.

ORCiD can do much more than just link traditional research to researchers. It can link researchers to other scholarly activities, such as reviews. When kept up to date, it’s a living record of all a researcher’s academic activities. And there is a link to equity – this year’s theme of OAweek. By providing a unique, global identifier, it ensures that everyone, everywhere, no matter how common or rare their name, can be equally visible.

And because it’s such a powerful connector, it has been integrated into a number of tools, including this one by Adrian Barnett, which can format publication lists and even show which ones are open access. Give your ORCiD a little love this #OAweek.