ORCID
The ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors and contributors. 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, 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 tax ID numbers, that are created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers.
The ORCID organization, ORCID Inc., 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 announced in 2009 as a collaborative effort by publishers of scholarly research "to resolve the author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication". The "Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative" - hence the name ORCID - was created temporarily prior to incorporation.A prototype was developed on software adapted from that used by Thomson Reuters for its ResearcherID system. ORCID, Inc. was incorporated as an independent nonprofit organization in August 2010 in Delaware, United States of America, with an international board of directors. Its executive Director, Laurel Haak, was appointed in April 2012. From 2016, the board is chaired by Veronique Kiermer of PLOS. ORCID is freely usable and interoperable with other ID systems. ORCID launched its registry services and started issuing user identifiers on 16 October 2012.
Identifiers
Formally, ORCID iDs are specified as URIs, for example, the ORCID iD for Josiah S. Carberry isORCID iDs are a subset of the International Standard Name Identifier, under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization, 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 iD – 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", is a MOD 11-2 check digit conforming to the ISO/IEC 7064:2003 standard.
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 committed to requiring authors publishing 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., the number of live accounts reported by ORCID was 7,765,228. 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 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 and the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Institutes, 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 and Australian Research Council "encourage all researchers applying for funding to have an ORCID identifier". The French scientific article repository HAL is also inviting its users to enter their ORCID iD.Integrations
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 PMC, 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, ProQuest, and Frontiers Loop.
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.