NIH Requiring ORCID Accounts for Certain Grants

A change is on the horizon for early-career researchers involved in grant opportunities from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Starting this fall, NIH will require researchers who are involved in certain types of grants to link an ORCID ID number to their grants.

ORCID, or the Open Research and Contributor ID, is a digital identifier that shows the connections between researchers and their research contributions, funders, and institutions, enabling researchers to list this information in one central place. Starting October 2019, individuals supported by NIH institutional research training, career development, and education awards (e.g., T awards) will be required to link an ORCID ID with their NIH research administration (eRA Commons) account. Individuals will also need ORCID IDs when applying for individual fellowship and career development awards (e.g., F and K awards) due on or after January 25, 2020.

To register for an ORCID account, please click here.

NIH suggests that its partnership with ORCID will reduce the amount of administrative work required to apply for funding. With an ORCID ID, psychological scientists can use their digital identifier to automatically populate sections of compatible funding applications, avoiding the need to continually re-enter the same information into different applications. According to NIH, use of ORCID IDs will also allow organizations like NIH to track the progress of researchers along their career path to better monitor their professional outcomes.

The move to encouraging platforms such as ORCID is a global trend with NIH, the US Department of Energy, NASA, and the Wellcome Trust adopting support for ORCID to better track researchers and their research outcomes. APS journal submitters are also able to link to their ORCID accounts during the article submission process.

To learn more about the National Institutes of Health’s integration with ORCID, please click here.