I just noticed the following words from arXiv:
"You are encouraged to associate your ORCID with your arXiv account. ORCID iDs are standard, persistent identifiers for research authors. ORCID iDs will gradually supersede the role of the arXiv author identifier."
I thus wonder if a person's profile in ORCID is really that important, given that the person would like to pursue a career in academia?
Answer
While I largely agree with Ian's answer (ORCID might matter in the future, but doesn't right now), I see one place where it may already matter and a reason why it should come to matter more in the future.
Right now, there is a strong implicit presumption of the uniqueness of a scientist's name, and all of the literature searches and citation databases, etc, of the world get rather confused when you have a person who either a) shares the same name as other practicing scientists or b) has a name that changes over time (e.g., marriage, gender identity change) or is represented differently (e.g., transliterated) in different papers.
On this site, we have a number of good, difficult questions dealing with the problems that name change and transliteration cause, which is particularly acute for academics in countries that don't use the Latin alphabet (e.g. this excellent question). These problems will grow in importance as the number of practicing scientists grows and becomes more diverse, and as the duration of the readily searchable literature grows as well.
In short: there is a rapidly growing need for something like ORCID that makes it easy to distinguish scientists without context-sensitive text mining. Whether ORCID is that thing, and how long it will take for it to be widely adopted and effective, are both open questions.
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