Manage your identity with ORCID

Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) is an international system for the persistent identification of academic authors.

ORCID

It is a non-proprietary system, managed by an international consortium consisting of universities, national libraries, research institutes and data repositories.

Publications, research data and associated metadata are often stored in different bibliographic systems, and, at present, it is often difficult to connect these resources correctly. When we search in such databases using names, this often leads to confusion about the identity of authors. Personal names may change, and they are certainly not always unique. In many cases, we can only refer reliably to persons when we make use of unique and persistent numbers. ORCID has emerged as one of the most important systems for author identification.

When you connect their research output to your ORCID, your works can always be attributed to you correctly. Next to journal articles, ORCIDs can also be connected to data sets, teaching materials, peer review activities and conference papers. When your research results are associated with an ORCID, the information about these resources can be exchanged effectively across databases, across countries and across academic disciplines.

Importantly, you always retain full control over your own ORCID id. You need to request your own ORCID at the ORCID website, and you are also responsible for the information that is associated with this identifier. You can easily indicate which information can be made public, and which information needs to remain private.

ORCID is demanded increasingly by academic publishers. With journals issued by publishers such as PLOS, The Royal Society, Science, Wiley, Springer Nature and IOP Publishing, the use of ORCID is mandatory for all article submissions. Next to this, an increasing number of funding agencies demand that researchers provide an ORCID when they submit grant proposals.

What are the main advantages?

Using ORCID enhances the findability and the visibility of your publications and your research data. Systems such as Web of Science and Scopus offer their users the possibility to search on the basis of ORCID identifiers. Research results which are associated with an ORCID can be found more effectively in such bibliographic databases.
As a global system, ORCID is not linked to one university in particular, and this means that you can easily take all the information associated with ORCID with you when you accept a position at a different university. Information about your new publications can be added automatically to your ORCID record, by making use of the auto-update functionality.
Additionally, ORCID makes it easier for you to keep your list of publications in LUCRIS up-to-date, since it is also possible to import data from your ORCID profile.
You have complete control over the visibility settings of all of your information, as explained in the ORCID privacy policy

Ensuring the integrity of the data

One of the central principles of the ORCID system is that authors remain fully responsible for the information that is shown on their ORCID records. The central ORCID organisation only performs quality control to a very limited degree. To ensure the correctness of the data, ORCID mainly relies on the community of users, who remain in control. There are a number of procedures in place, however, to ensure the integrity of the data. If a user attempts to make a new account which looks like an account which exists already, ORCID displays a list of accounts which may form potential duplicates. Email addresses, furthermore, can only be associated with one single ORCID account. When you try to add an email address that has already been added to another ORCID identifier, you will receive an error message with information on how to proceed. As duplicate ORCID accounts are sometimes created because users lose their login credentials, ORCID enables users to link their account to other accounts, such the institutional account, or the Facebook account.

One of the potential disadvantages of the lack of a central control, however, is that users may also supply false information. They can associate their ORCID identifiers with articles that they have not actually written, for instance. More seriously, they may choose to steal somebody’s identity and claim to be somebody else. It is important to emphasis that ORCID has developed a data dispute procedure. When you have discover that another ORCID record contains incorrect information, you can file a complaint and send it to the ORCID helpdesk via support@orcid.org. The helpdesk will then try to rectify the errors in a collaborative manner, by contacting the owner of the ORCID account in question. If the problem cannot be resolved by the help desk, it will be escalated to the ORCID Ombudsperson for dispute resolution.

Data Protection

Since ORCID’s launch in 2012, more than 4.500.000 people have created an ORCID account. ORCID is strongly committed to protect the security of all the information about these individuals. ORCID does not share the information that you supply with other organization unless you give an explicit permission. On your ORCID account, you can always view a list of ‘trusted organisation’, under ‘Account Settings’. The permissions may be revoked at any moment. While the data about researchers may be stored on servers located outside of the country in which the data was entered originally, independent auditors have certified that all of ORCID’s data security processes are fully consistent with the principles that are stipulated by the Privacy Shield Framework, and with the privacy regulations of the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Privacy Shield Framework was designed by US government and by the European Commission to guarantee that personal data can be transferred from the EU to the US without violating international data protection requirements. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) similarly, applies to all companies processing the personal data of all European Union residents, regardless of where the company is located. More information on the concrete measures that have been taken to comply with the GDPR regulations can be found on ORCID’s website.

More information

More information on how to connect ORCID to LUCRIS can be found in the online manual and on the dedicated ORCID posts on our Digital Scholarship Blog

Questions about ORCID can be asked online via 'Ask a Librarian'.