The last week of October is Open Access Week, and the Office of Scholarly Communication is running a competition, open to all staff and students at the University of Cambridge who contribute to its research profile. The competition involves creating an ORCiD profile (if you don’t already have one), and linking your ORCiD to your Symplectic profile.

The prize is a £150 Heffers gift voucher, which will be randomly drawn from the list of those who connect up their ORCiD and Symplectic accounts.

To be eligible, you must be eligible for a Symplectic profile (more details below), and you must link your ORCiD and Symplectic accounts between Monday, 16th October and Thursday, 26th October (so set those calendar alerts now!). The winner will be announced on Friday, 27th October.

ORCiD is a unique identifier for researchers. It’s free to create, and not linked to any institution, so if you move from one university to another, your ORCiD will stay the same. It’s useful in distinguishing, for example, Jane Smith who researches neurology from Jane Smith the historian. It’s also helpful in linking up work published in one journal as ‘Jane Smith’, another as ‘J. Smith’, and a third as ‘Jane E. Smith’, or connecting publications made after a researcher has changed their name and making sure others know they are the work of one individual. For examples of what ORCiD profiles look like, see those of Medical Librarian Isla Kuhn and library assistant Veronica Phillips.

Symplectic Elements is an internal University of Cambridge system that collects information about articles, conference papers and other research outputs produced by Cambridge staff and students.

If anyone needs help setting up their ORCiD account or connecting it with Symplectic, get in touch. Unfortunately this competition is not open to NHS staff (unless they also work for or study at the university), but if any NHS staff would also like help setting up an ORCiD account, they are very welcome to contact us as well.

More details about the competition here.