There are many millions of students and researchers around the world; many have very similar names and until recently reliably disambiguating these into real people could be a challenging task. The problem is starting to be solved by assigning any researcher or collaborated an open identifier, or ORCID. This identifier can then be associated with your scientific activities, which makes this unique on a global scale (in a manner that your name alone never was). To introduce you to this new concept, we will be setting up a system to allow staff and students alike to acquire an ORCID for themselves and to use it in various contexts such as digital repository deposition (and journal publication).
Acquiring an ORCID ID
This link is used to create an account for yourself. This will create a 16-digit ID unique to yourself.
Once your account is created, you should populate the ORCID record with information about yourself. During your stay at Imperial College, this should include your status as a student.
In logging in, you can use your 16-digit ID OR the email you provided.
If you forget your password or ID, you will have to recover it yourself at the ORCID site. This information is not kept by Imperial College.
Associating the ORCID credentials
ORCID can used to associate credentials (provenance) with various resources. These in the future will include document submission systems, grant awarding bodies, journal publication, indeed all aspects of scientific disseminations.
ORCID and HPC
In the first instance, you will use your ORCID to associate your Imperial College user account with access to the High Performance Computing unit, used for some course work.
Log into the ORCID site using your credentials (the ORCID itself or your email address as the user name).
Click on authorize This should return you to the HPC site, where your ORCID identifier should now be populated in your profile.
From now on, whenever you publish a calculation performed in this environment, your ORCID will be added to the metadata for that entry.
In its full potential, you should be able to search for all data recorded against your ORCID, using sites such as DataCite. Compound searches using a variety of other (chemical) terms will allow very rich searches to be performed.
