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ORCID — Open Researcher and Contributor ID

Overview

ORCID is an international non-profit organisation that provides persistent digital identifiers for researchers and contributors to scholarly activity. An ORCID iD is a 16-digit identifier (formatted as a URL: https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000) that uniquely and persistently identifies a researcher across institutions, name changes and career stages. ORCID has millions of registered researchers and is integrated into hundreds of publishing, funding, repository and research management systems worldwide.

The core problem ORCID solves is name ambiguity: common names, transliterations, middle name conventions and institutional affiliations change over time, making it unreliable to identify researchers by name string alone. The ORCID iD is researcher-controlled and researcher-asserted: the researcher owns their record and grants permissions to trusted organisations to read from or write to it.

ORCID Record and API

An ORCID record holds biographical information, employment history, education, funding, peer review activity, and works (publications, datasets, software). The record is populated through a combination of self-assertion and trusted organisation assertions. The public API allows any system to read public ORCID data; the member API allows trusted organisations to push and pull data with researcher consent.

A key mechanism is the “push” workflow used by publishers, funders and repositories: when a researcher submits a manuscript, dataset or grant application using their ORCID iD, the system can automatically update their ORCID record with the output. This creates a persistent, machine-readable record of research contributions linked by a stable identifier rather than a name string.

Integration in the Open Science Ecosystem

ORCID iDs are embedded throughout the infrastructure in this graph. Repositories including OpenNeuro, Zenodo, OSF, EGA, DANDI Archive, and Recherche Data Gouv all collect ORCID iDs at deposit and embed them in dataset metadata. Publication platforms including Preprint Servers and HAL collect ORCID at submission. Funders including ANR Open Science Policy and EC Open Science Policy require ORCID for grant applications. DataCite includes ORCID as the preferred creator identifier in its metadata schema.

Relationship to ROR and Other Identifiers

ORCID is part of a broader persistent identifier ecosystem. ROR (Research Organization Registry) provides the institutional equivalent: a persistent identifier for research organisations. Together, ORCID (person) + ROR (institution) + DataCite DOI (output) form the core identifier stack for FAIR scholarly communications. The FAIR Principles explicitly require globally unique persistent identifiers; ORCID is the community answer for the researcher dimension.

Connections

  • Integrates with: DataCite (preferred creator identifier in metadata schema)

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