ORCID

For ORCID use on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:ORCID.

ORCID

Full name	Open Researcher and Contributor ID
Number issued	> 1,855,000
Introduced	16 October 2012 (2012-10-16)
Managing organisation	ORCID, Inc.
Number of digits	16
Check digit	MOD 11-2
Example	http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5882-6823
Website	orcid.org

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors. This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature or publications in the humanities can be hard to recognize as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems. It provides a persistent identity for humans, similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs).

The ORCID organization offers an open and independent registry intended to be the de facto standard for contributor identification in research and academic publishing. On 16 October 2012, ORCID launched its registry services and started issuing user identifiers.

Development and launch

ORCID was first organized as the "Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative". A prototype was developed on software adapted from that used by Thomson Reuters for its ResearcherID system. The registry is now an independent nonprofit organization, ORCID, Inc., incorporated in August 2010 in Delaware, United States of America, with an international board of directors. Its executive Director, Laure Haak, was appointed in April 2012. As of 2015, the board is chaired by Ed Pentz of CrossRef. ORCID is freely usable and interoperable with other ID systems. ORCID launched its registry services and started issuing user identifiers on 16 October 2012. Formally, ORCID IDs are specified as URIs, for example, the ORCID for John Wilbanks is http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4510-0385. However, some publishers use the short form, e.g. "ORCID: 0000-0002-4510-0385".

ORCID is a subset of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (as ISO 27729) and the two organizations are cooperating. ISNI will uniquely identify contributors to books, television programmes, and newspapers, and has reserved a block of identifiers for use by ORCID, in the range 0000-0001-5000-0007 to 0000-0003-5000-0001. It is therefore possible for a person to legitimately have both an ISNI and an ORCID - effectively, two ISNIs.

Both ORCID and ISNI use 16-character identifiers, using the digits 0–9, and separated into groups of four by hyphens. The final character, which may also be a letter "X" representing the value "10" (for example, Nick Jennings' ORCID is http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0166-248X), is a MOD 11-2 check digit conforming to the ISO/IEC 7064:2003 standard.

An ORCID account for a fictitious person, Josiah Carberry, exists as http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097, for use in testing and training examples.

Uses

The aim of ORCID is to aid "the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature". Another suggested use is to provide each researcher with "a constantly updated ‘digital curriculum vitae’ providing a picture of his or her contributions to science going far beyond the simple publication list." The idea is that other organizations will use the open-access ORCID database to build their own services.

It has been noted in an editorial in Nature that ORCID, in addition to tagging the contributions that scientists make to papers, "could also be assigned to data sets they helped to generate, comments on their colleagues’ blog posts or unpublished draft papers, edits of Wikipedia entries and much else besides".

In April 2014, ORCID announced plans to work with the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information to record and acknowledge contributions to peer review.

In an open letter dated 1 January 2016 eight publishers, including the Royal Society, the American Geophysical Union, Hindawi, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, PLOS, and Science, committed to requiring all authors in their journals to have an ORCID iD.

Members, sponsors and registrants

By the end of 2013 ORCID had 111 member organizations and over 460,000 registrants. On 15 November 2014, ORCID announced the one-millionth registration. As of 1 January 2016, the number of registered accounts reported by ORCID was 1,855,353. The organizational members include many research institutions such as Caltech and Cornell University, and publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Nature Publishing Group. There are also commercial companies including Thomson Reuters, academic societies and funding bodies.

Grant-making bodies such as the Wellcome Trust (a charitable foundation) have also begun to mandate that applicants for funding provide an ORCID identifier.

National implementations

In several countries, consortia, including government bodies as partners, are operating at a national level to implement ORCID. For example, in Italy, seventy universities and four research centres are collaborating under the auspices of the Conference of Italian University Rectors (CRUI) and the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Institutes (ANVUR), in a project implemented by Cineca, a not-for-profit consortium representing the universities,research institutions, and the Ministry of Education. In Australia, the government's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) "encourage all researchers applying for funding to have an ORCID identifier".

Integrations

Nick Jennings' ORCID in his Wikidata entry

In addition to members and sponsors, journals, publishers, and other services have included ORCID in their workflows or databases. For example, the Journal of Neuroscience, Springer Publishing, the Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Europe PubMed Central, the Japanese National Institute of Informatics's Researcher Name Resolver, Wikipedia, and Wikidata.

Some online services have created tools for exporting data to, or importing data from, ORCID. These include Scopus, Figshare, Thomson Reuters' ResearcherID system, Researchfish. the British Library (for their EThOS thesis catalogue), ProQuest (for their ProQuest Dissertations and Theses service),

In October 2015, DataCite, CrossRef and ORCID announced that the former organisations would update ORCID records, "when an ORCID identifier is found in newly registered DOI names".

Third-party tools allow the migration of content from other services into ORCID, for example Mendeley2ORCID, for Mendeley.

Some ORCID data may also be retrieved as RDF/XML, RDF Turtle, XML or JSON. ORCID uses GitHub as its code repository.

See also

• Authority control
• Digital Author Identifier
• OpenID
• VIAF

External links

• Official website
• 2010 paper discussing structure of ORCID identifiers (updated 2012)
• Interview with ORCID Executive Director, Laurel Haak, on Editage Insights: A vision to transform the research ecosystem