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ORCID

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is the open registry of persistent identifiers for people in research. It is run by ORCID, Inc., a non-profit organisation founded in 2010, and opened its registry in October 2012. Registering is free for researchers; the organisation is funded by its members — universities, publishers, funders — who use its services to collect, read and write their people's data. A name does not identify a researcher: names are shared, spelled in several ways, transliterated, and changed. An ORCID iD does, for life and across every organisation the researcher works with.

The iD

  • The shape. Sixteen characters in four groups of four, such as 0000-0002-1825-0097, the iD of ORCID's fictitious example researcher. The last character is a check digit (ISO/IEC 7064 MOD 11-2), and can be an X; a mistyped iD is therefore almost always detected.
  • The form to use. ORCID asks that an iD be written as its full address, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097, which is at once the identifier and a link to the record; the sixteen characters alone are what databases usually store.
  • The number space is a block of that of ISNI, the ISO standard identifier for public identities, so an ORCID iD never collides with an ISNI.
  • One person, one iD. An iD is never reassigned. A person who registered twice can have the duplicate deprecated: it then points to the primary record. A record can also be deactivated by its owner.

The record

  • What it holds. Behind every iD is a record: names and other names, biography, keywords, links, other identifiers of the person (Scopus Author ID, ResearcherID, …), and the activities — employments, education and qualifications, invited positions, distinctions, memberships, service, funding, works, peer reviews, research resources.
  • Organisations by identifier. Employers and institutions are identified by ROR, the open registry of research organisations, so an affiliation is a link and not only a name.
  • The researcher controls it. Each item has a visibility: everyone, trusted parties or only me. A record can therefore exist and show nothing to the public: an empty record proves the person's identity to nobody but its owner.

Sources and trusted organisations

  • Every item has a source: the researcher themselves, or an organisation that asserted it. An employment added by the university, or a work added by its publisher, is worth more as evidence than one typed by hand, and the record shows which is which.
  • Trusted organisations. With the researcher's permission, given once through ORCID's sign-in (OAuth), a member organisation can read the record's limited items and add to it.
  • Auto-update. When a DOI is registered with Crossref or DataCite and its metadata carry an author's iD, the work is added to that author's record without anyone typing it; the researcher is told through the record's inbox, as for every addition by a trusted organisation.
  • Authenticated iDs. An iD collected through ORCID's sign-in, rather than typed into a form, is known to belong to the person who gave it; publishers and funders collect iDs this way at submission.

Where iDs travel

  • APIs. The public API, free, reads the public part of any record and lets any service authenticate an iD; the member API also reads limited items and writes. Once a year ORCID publishes all public data as an open data file.
  • Metadata standards. An iD is the usual identifier of a person in the metadata of works: a nameIdentifier of scheme ORCID in DataCite and in the OpenAIRE guidelines, an ORCID element in Crossref, a sameAs of a Person in schema.org.
  • Services. Publishers ask authors for their iD; funders ask applicants; repositories such as Zenodo let people sign in with it; OpenAIRE uses it to link people to their works across sources.

See also