What is ORCID?
ORCID stands for Open Researcher & Contributor ID. ORCID aims to solve the author or contributor name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes.
As of 2012, 300 organizations had joined ORCID as participants. Dykes Library is excited to participate in ORCID and to help realize the potential benefits to KU.
The contributor ambiguity problem is one many of us encounter every day, whether in the classroom, the laboratory, or the library. Here are some of the tangible outcomes we should expect from participating in ORCID:
- Help discovery systems and people doing research more reliably identify authors of works.
- Help authors submit articles while filling out fewer forms.
- Help institutions better assess researcher and research activity.
- Expand understanding of what goes into doing research and more accurately assess activity, making it possible to better reward researchers for activities that currently go unseen such as curating data, writing software, and making unpublished contributions.
What will Phase 1 do?
- Lay the foundation for the ORCID system.
- Focus on self-asserted claims, claims that a researcher makes about himself.
- Seed the system with data from existing institutional or other systems.
Phase 1 code release is targeted for March 2012. API specifications and a mock API were released in 2011.
Phase 2 will address the complexities of allowing 3rd parties to make assertions about researchers.
See the videos and interviews at orcid.org for more discussion of the ORCID strategy and the problems it addresses.
