ORCID: connecting researchers and scholars with their works

Abstract

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a community-driven non-profit organization that provides an open registry of persistent identifiers for researchers and scholars. The mission of ORCID is to address the name ambiguity problem in research and scholarly communication. ORCID works with the research community to embed identifiers in research workflows: grant applications, manuscript submissions, association membership renewal, meeting abstract submission, everywhere that a person can be connected with a research or scholarly contribution. This article describes ORCID, and its adoption by the research community, and provides examples of how ORCID identifiers are being integrated by organizations throughout the community and becoming part of the metadata on a diverse set of documents. Ultimately, the goal of ORCID is to improve discoverability, reduce repetitive data entry, and thereby allow researchers and organizations more time to focus on research and scholarly pursuits.