ORCID, an acronym for “Open Researcher and Contributor ID," is a non-profit, interdisciplinary, and community-based organization that provides and assigns (via the ORCID Registry) one persistent digital identifier to one particular author/researcher, in order to resolve the “name ambiguity problem” that can exist in research/scholarly communications, as, for example, when a researcher marries and changes names. In addition, ORCID provides a means of linking an author’s research activities (publications, grants, and patents) by use of the ORCID identifier. To illustrate, in the string http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0079-6083, 0000-0002-0079-6083 is the ORCID identifier for Trey Lemley. Entering the complete URL (i.e., http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0079-6083) into the URL box of your browser takes you to the publication record for Trey Lemley.
Researchers can link their ORCID profile to external webpages, including personal websites or social media accounts, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, among others. ORCID is working with various groups to integrate ORCID identifiers into research workflows (i.e., manuscript and grant submissions) and to provide system-to-system processes for updating activity records. In particular, both ORCID and ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier, have recently agreed to aim for interoperation by linking and sharing public data between the two systems, since both organizations assign identifiers to individuals and use the same identifier format. ORCID and ISNI also plan to investigate the feasibility of a shared identifier scheme for a single number to represent an individual in both the ORCID and ISNI databases.
ORCID is governed by representatives of its member organizations, which include the California Institute of Technology, CERN, Cornell University, Elsevier, MIT, NIH, and Thomson Reuters, among others.
Registration with ORCID is free.
