ORCID

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a proposed nonproprietary alphanumeric code that would uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors.^[1][2] This will remove the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature can be hard to electronically recognize as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems. It would provide for humans a persistent identity — an "author DOI" — similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs).^[3]

It is intended to offer an open and independent registry that will be the de facto standard for author identification in science and related academic publishing.

Development

At present ORCID is being organized by the Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative.^[2] The prototype is planned to be run on software used already by Thomson Reuters for its ResearcherID system. An independent organization will run the eventual production system and assign ORCIDs to individuals.^[1] ORCID is planned to be freely usable by any such group, and interoperable with their ID systems.^[1]

Other schemes for contributor ID have been proposed including the International Standard Name Identifier, under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization, which would uniquely identify contributors to books, television programmes, and newspapers.

Uses

It is hoped to aid "the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature".^[4] Another suggested use is to provide each researcher with "a constantly updated ‘digital curriculum vitae’ providing a picture of his or her contributions to science going far beyond the simple publication list."^[1]

Other uses

It has been noted in an editorial in Nature that ORCID in addition to tagging the contributions scientists make to papers that it "could also be assigned to data sets they helped to generate, comments on their colleagues’ blog posts or unpublished draft papers, edits of Wikipedia entries and much else besides."^[1]

ORCID group

The founding parties of the Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative include:^{[2][not in citation given]}

• American Institute of Physics
• American Psychological Association
• Association for Computing Machinery
• British Library
• CrossRef
• Elsevier
• EMBO
• European Organization for Nuclear Research
• Hindawi
• Mendeley
• Microsoft Corporation
• MIT Libraries
• Nature Publishing Group
• ProQuest
• Public Library of Science
• RefWorks
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• Rutgers University
• SAGE Publications
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Springer
• Thomson Reuters
• Universitats Bibliothek^{[clarification needed]}
• University College London
• Wellcome Trust
• Wiley

See also

• Digital Author Identification
• International Standard Name Identifier
• OpenID
• ResearcherID
• VIAF

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} Editorial (2009). "Credit where credit is due". Nature. 462: 825. doi:10.1038/462825a
2. ^ ^{a b c} Open Researcher and Contributor Identification Initiative website
3. ^ CrossRef & ORCID
4. ^ Open Researcher and Contributor Identification Initiative website: About us

External links

• Open Researcher and Contributor Identification Initiative website