ORCID, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to solving the name ambiguity problem in scholarly research and brings together the leaders of the most influential universities, funding organizations, societies, publishers and corporations from around the globe. The ideal solution is to establish a registry that is adopted and embraced as the de facto standard by the whole of the community. A resolution to the systemic name ambiguity problem, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output, will enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration. The organization is managed by a fourteen member Board of Directors.

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for 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. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organizations, from governments to universities.

Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group convened the first Name Identifier Summit in Cambridge, MA in November 2009, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity. The ORCID initiative officially launched as a non-profit organization in August 2010 and is moving ahead with broad stakeholder participation (view participant gallery). As ORCID develops, we plan to engage researchers and other community members directly via social media and other campaigns.  Participation from all stakeholders at all levels is essential to fulfilling the Initiative’s mission.

Technical Contributions

Several organizations have agreed to contribute data sources and technologies to aid the initial development of the ORCID prototype, including: Researcher ID profile system from Thomson Reuters, author profiles from REPEC, Scholars Universe, Scopus, and bibliographic data from the CrossRef metadata database. In parallel, ORCID will be investigating and analyzing other contributor identification schemes and systems to determine how they can interoperate with this system.