What is ORCID? ORCID is an acronym for Open Researcher and Contributor ID system. Begun as a non-profit community-based effort by members of the academic research community, the primary goal of the ORCID project is to clearly attribute scholarly output to individual researchers via a unique, opaque identifier. Many different types of scholarly works can be linked to an individual’s ORCID identifier including grants, scholarly articles, books, data sets, and even conference proceedings.
The permanent ORCID identifier will be used to differentiate individuals and enable multiple variants of an individual’s name to account for changes in name over a researcher’s life. ORCID began accepting registrations in October 2012, and in just over one month has added more than 20,000 researchers to the database. Through privacy tools, individuals are able to control what level of information is shared publicly and what organizations are able to add information to their record.
How will this system be used? The ORCID system has been designed to be used by many different participants in the academic lifecycle. Funding agency grant applications, manuscript submission systems, and online publication are just a few of the numerous potential uses for ORCID.
Some manuscript submission systems have begun accepting ORCIDs, which may be used in a variety of ways. The potential benefits are huge and range from populating researcher metadata (such as email address and affiliation) to helping editorial office staff monitor for conflicts of interest and helping editorial boards more quickly identify and select qualified referees for peer review.
In the future some publishers will submit ORCID data with publication metadata to CrossRef (the organization which oversees the DOI system) to enable more accurate tracking of citations.
Publishers may also implement more sophisticated searching based on ORCIDs rather than name alone on their publishing platforms.
The ORCID service will also give researchers the choice of whether to allow trusted partners, such as publishers, to update the researchers’ ORCID record on their behalf. Such updates could include newly published materials or even newly awarded grants.
IOP Publishing and ORCID IOP Publishing and the Institute of Physics are platinum sponsors of the ORCID project. We believe that the long-term benefits that this initiative will bring are invaluable to sustain the rigour of the scientific record, and will ensure individual researchers get the recognition they deserve.
The project is still developing and we are in the process of deciding how we might best implement the service to maximize the benefits for the communities we serve.
How can I register? Registration is available via the ORCID website
During the registration process, the ORCID system will attempt to find scholarly articles connected to the registering researcher and also provide tools to help add content to your ORCID record.
Where can I find out more? More information can be found by visiting the ORCID project website.