Why would a researcher (faculty, graduate student-- anyone who has published papers) want to use one or more of these profile services? Any or all of these reasons:
Identify/Claim your own publications
Increase discoverability and visibility of your works
Manage your publications list
Track citations to your work
Funnel contacts from students and researchers
Fulfill publisher and grant requirements
Manage preprint requests
Share papers, presentations, and additional data
Participate in the open access movement
Among the scholarly profile services/scholarly networking services are:
Google Scholar Profile
ORCID
ResearcherID
You probably already use Google Scholar (scholar.google.com). You'll notice that sometimes, when you look up an author's name, you'll find a special entry at the top, like this:
You'll also see the same author's name underlined (hyperlinked) in entries in Google Scholar, like so:
Clicking on that link displays the author's contact information and a list of their publications as displayed in Google Scholar. This is their Google Scholar Profile.
Having a Google Scholar profile allows others interested in your work to easily identify your other publications; it also allows them to easily find your contact information, or even be notified when you publish something new. It also allows you to view and track the number of times your work is cited, and who has cited your work, and where. Last but not least, it allows you to differentiate yourself from other authors with similar names.
The Google Scholar Profile is the easiest for Drew Faculty to create, as we already have a linked Google Account. (In order to create a profile, you should have at least one publication that comes up under your name in Google Scholar.)
Bear in mind that all these services are created by for-profit organizations. That doesn't give them the rights to your copyrighted work, but it does allow them to use citations and metrics for their business model.
Before making full text available online, check your publication agreements to see that you have followed their guidelines. (Librarians can help with this!)
While materials that are online are easy to copy, they are also often easy to detect-- do a Google/Google Scholar search on relatively unique phrases from your work.