Godspeed, little paper

I submitted my manuscript this morning.

I will admit a momentary qualm when I looked at the date - Monday the 13th hardly seems an auspicious date for submitting a paper, especially for someone like me with a 50/50 (or slightly more, if you count each rejection that led to a rewrite and ultimately an acceptance) rejection to acceptance rate of papers.

But maybe, by reverse psychology, it IS an auspicious date.

Anyway. The person now in charge of the journal has dragged submission into the 21st century. The instructions to authors are still pretty humane (thank you for keeping "name and year" rather than the numbered-footnote setup, which I hate). And also, he looks like he's trying better to ensure blind review, which is a very good thing.

But to submit the paper, I needed an ORCID id number. This is apparently some kind of registry where researchers upload individual information so they can be uniquely identified (kind of like livestock with ear tags, my inner curmudgeon notes). It was....challenging....to get it to work, because the "id" isn't just the number, it's the whole URL with the number.

Also, I was at first hearing it in my head as being like "orchid" but when I went back to the site, it was ORC (in one color) ID (in another), which looks more like ORC ID to me, like either the identification of an ORC ("Orcs, this line, prepare to present your I.D.cards") or the id of an orc, which would be a Very Bad Thing indeed. (Orcs are probably ALL id, doesn't seem to be a lot of super-ego going on there).

I don't know. Having an ORCID number makes me seem much grander than I am....I don't have any big grants (actually, no grants at the moment) and I do very small-scale research. It actually scares me a little having to take this step, I think because of the whole playground-bully history I have....I don't expect fellow scientists to start shoving me around and going, "Oh, you think you're a big shot, don't you, with your ORCID number? Well, what national journal have you published in, eh? How many grants do you have, eh?" but I kind of feel like an impostor for having one....

At least I can stop thinking about the paper for a few weeks...