ProQuest Adds ORCID to Its Dissertations and Theses Database

ETD offers ability to create the ID during submission

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Oct 12, 2015, 10:18 ET

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 12, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The ProQuest Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Administrator, a popular submission and review platform, now enables dissertations and theses authors to add or create an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) when they submit their work. ORCID is a community-driven initiative that allows researchers to easily and precisely distinguish their work through the assignment of a unique identifier that's maintained in a central registry. ORCIDs will be assigned as part of the deposit process into ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global (PQDT Global), the renowned database of graduate works from the world's leading universities.

"ProQuest's goal is to continually improve the service we provide to the authors, researchers and universities who use PQDT Global," said Austin McLean, director, scholarly communication and dissertations publishing at ProQuest. "The addition of ORCID enhances the identification of the authors and the value of the submission process."

"We're delighted that ProQuest has become a member of the ORCID community," said Laure Haak, ORCID Executive Director. "Embedding ORCID identifiers in theses and dissertations is an important step in creating a persistent, open, and unique connection between students and their contributions to the scholarly discourse. We look forward to further functionality being developed for the PQDT platform that will enable verification by the student's degree-granting institution."

ORCID is an open, non-profit hub that connects researchers and their research through the embedding of unique identifiers in key workflows, such as research profile maintenance, manuscript submissions, grant applications, and patent applications. The identifiers —which a researcher can connect to non-sensitive information such as name, email, organization and research activities—address the challenge researchers face in distinguishing their research output from those of others with similar names. By attaching their unique ORCID identifier to such items as ETDs, datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks, researchers ensure their contributions will be uniquely and correctly attributed, regardless of repository platform or search engine.

PQDT Global is a key resource for universities and their graduate researchers, enabling them to preserve their scholarly communication and share it with the world's intellectual communities. Students upload their dissertations and theses through the ProQuest ETD and have the option to provide open access to their work, set embargoes or earn royalties through distribution via subscribing institutions. Including or creating an ORCID at the time of submission simplifies the author's workflow and enables them to more easily track and distinguish their research output. The ORCID will also provide a new precision search option for the researchers who rely on PQDT Global for finding cutting-edge research, important supplemental material like data sets and long-form versions of research that is often shortened when published as journal articles.

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The company's cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest^®, Bowker^®, Coutts^® information services, Dialog^®, ebrary^®, EBL™, and SIPX^® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon^® discovery service, the RefWorks^® citation and document management platform, MyiLibrary^® ebook platform, the Pivot^® research development tool and the Intota™ library services platform. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.