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ORCID Identifiers

About ORCID

ORCID’s (Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifier) mission is to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.

We do this by providing three interrelated services:

  • The ORCID iD: a unique, persistent identifier free of charge to researchers
  • An ORCID record connected to the ORCID iD, and 
  • A set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), as well as the services and support of communities of practice that enable interoperability between an ORCID record and member organizations so researchers can choose to allow connection of their iD with their affiliations and contributions

ORCID is a global, not-for-profit organization sustained by fees from our member organizations. We are community-built and governed by a Board of Directors representative of our membership with wide stakeholder representation. ORCID is supported by a dedicated and knowledgeable professional staff.

More about ORCID

What is an ORCID iD?

An ORCID iD is a unique, persistent 16-character identifier assigned to you when you register at https://orcid.org. It's free to register and it's portable--your iD is not affiliated with a specific institution. Your iD serves as a mechanism by which you may collect your digital scholarship and connect with other systems to maximize workflows and efficiently disseminate your scholarship.

Why get an ORCID iD?

  1. Your ORCiD iD distinguishes you and ensures your research outputs and activities are correctly attributed to you.
  2. Connect your ORCID iD to claim your digital scholarship by using ORCID Search & Link tools.
  3. Use when you submit your scholarship:
    • Manuscript to a publisher
    • Grant proposal to a funder
    • Datasets to repositories
    • Publications or datasets to Scholars Junction
  4. Populate Digital Measures by importing publication data from your ORCID record (see Using ORCID to Populate Digital Measures on the left sidebar).
  5. Streamline workflows by auto filling forms using your ORCID iD.
  6. Use your ORCID iD anytime there's an opportunity to link your works and scholarly activities to your ORCID record.
  7. Search ORCID using keywords to find other scholars throughout the world who are working in a related discipline.

Find out what ORCID identifiers are all about in the video below.

ORCID Video

ORCID videos on Vimeo