ORCID is a non-profit organization whose work is interoperable and open. It’s community-based, not owned by publishers and not funded by venture capital (unlike ResearchGate or Academia.edu).
The Open Researcher and Contributor ID or ORCID iD is a unique 16-digit identifier and the associated record (also called a profile) that researchers can register and use for free. It remains persistent throughout your career, no matter how your name or affiliation may change, allowing you to distinguish yourself from other researchers and store links to all your scholarly contributions.
Anyone who is doing research, publishing, applying for grants, peer reviewing journal articles, or who is ever planning to undertake any of these activities should register for an ORCID iD.
Eliminate name ambiguity: Help you stand out in your field from people with identical names, connect different forms of your name, and create a record that persists even if you change your name.
Link your work to you: Boost the visibility of your research by correctly linking you to your publications, grants, and other professional activities and research outputs. ORCID even has integrations to automatically add publications, datasets, peer review, and grants to your record from trusted sources.
Create a record you control: Your ORCID is not tied to your institution, so you use the same ORCID no matter where your career takes you and you are the one who gets to decide what information is visible.
Streamline publication, grant application, and other processes: Save yourself time by using your ORCID login for grant application and journal submission systems. You can pull data from your ORCID record rather than entering it again and connect your research activities across many systems in one place.
Adapted from ORCID: Get started with ORCID by MIT Libraries which is used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
If you have questions, please contact:
Center for Scholarly Communication & Open Publishing staff
Or, your subject librarian or specialist
