ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a powerful tool that allows researchers to record, share, and move their scholarly information. Imagine having a CV that follows you from institution to institution or if you change your name. ORCiD assigns you a unique identifier so that you can get credit (no matter where you go, no matter what you are called) for your scholarly work.
ORCID, a non-profit organization, "is part of the wider digital infrastructure needed for researchers to share information on a global scale. We enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations by providing an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities"
- ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-proprietary, non-profit community-based registry of research identifiers.
- Links authors to their datasets and other works in addition to articles.
- Authors can control what information in their ORCID profile they share. Only the ORCID ID is automatically shared. (See ORCID's privacy policy.)
- It is easy to import research output from other sources (including ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID, and Datacite) to your ORCID profile.
- Over 1,000 organizations have become ORCID members, including research institutions, funders, and publishers.
- For more information, read our ORCID FAQs or Haak, Laurel L. et al. 2012. "ORCID: a system to uniquely identify researchers." Learned Publishing 25(4): 259-64.
Why Use ORCID?
When you sign up for an ORCID, you will be given a 16-digit unique identifier, which will allow you to:
- Get credit for ALL of your scholarly work: articles, grants, education, and awards.
- Be who you are: If you've changed your name, you can associate your new name with your scholarly work under a different name.
- Avoid mistaken identity if someone else shares your name.
- Save time and repetition: Automatically populate your articles & grants using various importers or manually enter your work.
Best of all, it's free!
As a non-profit, ORCID is supported by a number of organizations, including publishers, universities, and libraries.
These are the benefits of using an ORCID iD:
- Prevent name ambiguity
- Personal names are often not unique and may change over time. ORCID prevents name ambiguity problems by providing a unique digital identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers.
- Enhance discoverability and visibility of your research
- Linking your research publications to your ORCID iD increases the discoverability of you as a researcher and your professional activities. Databases – such as Web of Science and Scopus – further enhance this visibility when you connect their author systems to your ORCID iD.
- One ORCID iD throughout your scholarly career
- ORCID functions independently, regardless of institution and/or country. A single ORCID iD therefore collects and showcases your linked outputs throughout the entirety of your career.
- ORCID for funding and/or publishing
- The new publishing environment and infrastructures require an author identification which guarantees interoperability. ORCID has been increasingly integrated into the workflows of publishers, research organizations and grant funders. The ORCID iD is used for applications, manuscript submission systems and/or peer review processes.
- Save time – Enter once, reuse often
- ORCID generates automated linkages between your identifier and your professional activities. The system supports data found from a variety of different outlets and outputs – articles, datasets, peer-review activities, conference papers and more. Having your professional activities bundled in one central registry allows you to easily transfer your research activities to new institutions and/or organizations.
About ORCID
When we use the term 'ORCID', it can have different meanings:
- It's the name of the organization with the mission to enable connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations, by providing a unique, persistent identifier. The EUR is a member of this organization.
- This unique, persistent identifier for researchers is the ORCID iD.
- With this identifier you get an ORCID record - there you can make the connections between the ORCID iD and your works, affiliations, funding etc. You control what information is displayed publicly.
- In the ORCID registry you can search for ORCID iDs and view public information in ORCID records.
- To add the works, affiliations, grants ORCID has created APIs to make sure the data is added in an easy way. For example, you can give Crossref permission to automatically add new publications to your ORCID record when Crossref finds your ORCID iD in their metadata.
