Two Reasons to Update Your AAS Member Profile

For many years it has been clear that the capability to easily disambiguate individuals with similar names would have benefits for scholarship. A broad-based initiative called ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) was formed in 2010, and the AAS joined as a founding sponsor in February 2011. Several hundred organizations are participating, including academic institutions, publishers, and scholarly societies. ORCID serves as a central registry that permits individuals to identify themselves and register their associated professional activities ― articles published, grants obtained, and awards received, for example. The use of an ORCID iD (yes, that’s how the ORCID community recommends writing it) for your identification will be increasingly important as you submit papers to journals, proposals to funding agencies, etc. Thus the AAS encourages all its members to obtain an ORCID iD, which you can do easily on the ORCID website.

Once you have your ORCID iD, you can add it to your AAS membership record. Go to members.aas.org, log in with your AAS username and password, and click on My Account in the main menu. On the page that comes up next, you’ll see a Contact Information box, which you can modify by clicking on the little “pencil” icon in the upper-right corner. You should enter your ORCID iD in the input box at the bottom of the Edit window, in the format 0000-0000-0000-0000 (i.e., including dashes), then click the Save button.

When you’re editing your member profile, you might notice another new field: Cell Phone. We strongly encourage you to provide the AAS with your cell-phone number. We will not publish members’ cell numbers in the AAS Membership Directory (neither the printed version nor the online version). We want these numbers only for internal purposes, for example, in case we need to reach you in an emergency during a Society meeting. Enter your cell number in the Cell Phone input box in the Edit window, make any other necessary/appropriate changes to your contact info, then click the Save & Close button.

Keeping your member profile up to date will enable us to serve you better, so thanks for doing it!