Managing the digital identity as researchers

Abstract

Recently IGI Global has introduced a link between its publications and ORCID. The ORCID id is the most recognized id for researchers into the scientific ecosystem (Carpenter, 2015). It provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. Having an ORCID id is a recommendable action in most of the journals for both publishing and reviewing, and it is expected to be mandatory metadata in all of them shortly. Moreover, nowadays a researcher must have and take care a digital identity as professional that is directly linked to his/her academic reputation. The researcher’s digital identity is composed by all the digital profiles he/she has in the different research profile systems such as ResearcherId (Wos), Scopus, Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate and so on (Harzing & Alakangas, 2016). Opening a researcher profile into a new system should be carefully thought because the researcher has to balance the opportunities and benefits it has with the responsibility and effort that it demands to be profitable. As many researcher profiles an academic has, most visibility and potential benefits he/she might have, but also much work is needed to maintain those profiles. The digital transformation of the research forces the researchers to open and maintain different digital profiles, but it should be done strategically, selecting the mandatory ones and choosing those that might give them a set of possible benefits (Bartling & Friesike, 2014). From JITR, we encourage to open and care, at least, these digital profiles as a researcher: ORCID, ResearcherID, Scopus and Google Scholar (García-Peñalvo, 2018).