ORCID: Open Researcher and Contributor ID
ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code designed to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication. It provides a persistent digital identifier, known as an ORCID iD, that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher with the same or a similar name. The ORCID iD and connections are stored in the ORCID Registry, which is an account owned and managed by the individual researcher. This identifier supports automatic links among all professional activities and is interoperable with various publishers, funders, and institutions.
ORCID is a global, not-for-profit organization sustained by membership fees from organizational members across all sectors of the research community, including associations, funders, publishers, repositories, research organizations, and more. It is community-built and governed by a transparent, majority non-profit, independent Board that is representative of its broad membership. ORCIDs work is open, transparent, and non-proprietary, and it positions the researcher at the center of everything it does. All data contributed to ORCID by researchers or claimed by them is available in standard formats for free download, subject to the researchers own privacy settings, and is released under a CC0 waiver. Additionally, all software developed by ORCID is publicly released under an Open Source Software license approved by the Open Source Initiative.
In summary, ORCID provides a crucial digital infrastructure for researchers to share information on a global scale, and its vision is to uniquely identify and connect all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation to their contributions and affiliations across time, disciplines, and borders.
