ORCID Identifier
ORCID stands for Open Research and Contributor ID. It is another type of persistent identifier, like a DOI. An ORCID is assigned to an individual researcher or contributor. It serves as a reliable digital identifier that distinguishes one researcher from another, regardless of name variations or affiliations, and links them to their scholarly and research activities.
ORCIDs play a crucial role in promoting transparency, recognition and attribution in academic research. By using ORCIDs, researchers can take ownership of their scholarly output, establish a clear identity in the academic community, and receive proper credit for their contributions.
ORCIDs provide author disambiguation, reducing the chances of misidentification and ensuring that researchers receive due recognition for their work. The adoption of ORCIDs has become increasingly prevalent in the academic world, fostering collaboration, facilitating research assessment, and enhancing the reliability and integrity of scholarly communications.
An ORCID profile of scholarly and research activities can be currated manually. However, software systems have been developed to automatically search, retrieve and collate scholarly and research activities tagged with personal ORCIDs. There are multiple publicly accessible software systems available that, together, provide an ecosystem of databases, access points and interfaces to discover and collate information tagged with PIDs. If a research has an ORCID, these systems can automatically populate and maintain a profile of works by the researcher.
VIVO and Symplectic Elements are two open source software systems that can be integrated together and customised to provide an institution-specific researcher networking and discovery service. It integrates data from multiple bibliographical sources, such as free sources like ORCID and PubMed, and proprietary sources like Dimensions, Scopus, Web of Science through paid institution licences. These customised systems can provide an expertise discovery gateway to facilitate collaboration among academic researchers and spark increased engagement with other communities in academia, industry and the media, locally, nationally and internationally. (e.g. McMaster University Experts)
Creating an ORCID, and connecting your research activities with this ORCID allows these public and institution-specific systems to automatically populate and maintain your research profile. The PIDs of your research outputs, such as software DOIs, can then be found on your research profile and reliably used to retrieve these works.
Who can get an ORCID?
From ORCID.org:
ORCID is open to everyone who may find ORCID useful. For simplicity, we often use the word “researcher” when referring to an ORCID record holder, but the “C” in ORCID stands for “contributor.” Our users hail from a far broader context than just one word can encompass. In fact, ORCID enables everyone who might find benefit from using the ORCID Registry to be able to obtain and use an ORCID iD.
Any rigid definition of who would “qualify” for an iD would likely unintentionally exclude people for whom an ORCID iD would be useful due to the wide diversity of circumstances researchers find themselves in around the world. Read more about who else might use an ORCID record, and how ORCID balances researcher control and data quality here.
The threshold is very low for obtaining an ORCID, deliberately so to be inclusive of the research community. If an ORCID is useful for your research, get an ORCID today!