What is ORCID, Inc.?

The central goal of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID non-profit organization (ORCID) is to solve the long-standing name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication. Accurate attribution is a fundamental pillar of the scholarly record. Global identification infrastructure exists for content but not for the producers of that content, creating challenges in establishing the identity of authors and other contributors and reliably linking them to their published works.

The core mission of ORCID is to rectify this by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author identifier schemes. This registry will be a centralized identity system for collecting and managing information describing i) contributors themselves and ii) relationships between contributors and their scholarly publications as well as various other types of academic output.