Laurel L Haak on ORCID Author Identifiers

Laurel L. Haak is Executive Director of ORCID. She provided an outline of what they do and new developments for 2014 at the Data, the universe and everything seminar.

ORCID is an independent non-profit organisation supported by member fees. They run an open registry of unique identifiers for researchers and APIs for the community to embed identifiers in research systems and workflows. Data marked public by researchers is published annually by ORCID under a CC0 waiver. ORCID code is available on their GitHub open source repository and they support community efforts to develop tools and services.

ORCID is for anyone who contributes to scholarly communication – not just academics or researchers. They capture and make more public what these contributions are, particularly for peer review.

There are multiple contribution types including:

• Funding
• Publications
• Service Activities
• Affiliations
• People
• Datasets
• Impacts.

ORCID is a unique identifier that will go with you through your career. It is integrated in standard workflows and embedded in works metadata, independent of platform. You can link in with websites and other identifiers (eg ResearcherID, Scopus, Author ID, ISNI). It tackles the issue of different spellings of names and is great for thinking beyond the paper.

ORCID has broad international usage with 34 countries with over 10,000 unique visitors and 82 countries with over 1,000 unique visitors. The registry supports multiple character sets. They have content in Spanish, French, English and Chinese (adding Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian in 2014). 

They have issued over 500,000 identifiers since the launch in October 2012 with registrations growing steadily. The majority (about two thirds) come through trusted parties such as publishers. They are also beginning to see universities creating ORCID identifiers for research staff

ORCID works collaboratively with the research community to ensure use and adoption of research information exchange standards (e.g. ISNI, ODIN, CASRAI, Ringgold, CERiF-XML, CrossRef etc). They link to and include identifiers from other systems including DOIs, ISBNs, ISNIs, etc.

New features in 2014 include:

• Funding
• New languages
• Account delegation
• Third party assertions
• New search and link wizards
• Continuing to harmonize metadata

Who is integrating ORCID and how? They are working with research funders, professional associations, research institutions and metrics sites to incorporate ORCID IDs.