figshare was one of the ORCID launch partners and since said launch back in October, we have been looking for ways to take advantage of the new functionality to streamline the figshare user experience. Our first step in this is the release today of figshare-ORCID bi-directional syncing. For those who don’t know what ORCID is, here are some details:

“ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.”

Syncing with ORCID helps in 2 distinct ways:

• All of your publicly available figshare outputs can now be added to your ORCID account, again giving you credit for all of your research.
• Your publication list can be pulled into your figshare profile to avoid duplicated effort. This is also true for other pieces of information, such as your academic biography.

To sync your ORCID profile, simply log into figshare, go to the arrow next to your name in the top right hand corner, click 'My profile', 'edit profile' and 'Sync with ORCID'.

This integration follows on from the stellar work of ODIN. ODIN is a research project that will build on the ORCID and DataCite initiatives to uniquely identify scientists and data sets and connect this information across multiple services and infrastructures for scholarly communication. It will address some of the critical open questions in the area:

• Referencing a data object
• Tracking of use and re-use
• Links between a data object, subsets, articles, rights statements and every person involved in its life-cycle.

figshare is in attendance at the ORCID conference in Oxford today hearing about other publisher’s and institution’s linking up with ORCID. We will also be prominently displaying linked ORCID account details on the figshare user profile pages as part of an overhaul of the profile design coming soon.

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed. Please get in touch at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.