Wondering what ORCiD is all about? Do you have a common last or first name? Are you often mistaken for someone else at your institution or in your field of research? Whether or not you have such problems, ORCiD offers an identifying number that links all of your publications to you, regardless of current name, institutional affiliation or research discipline.
ORCiD (pronounced “orkid”) stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCiD is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers. An ORCiD iD acts as a unique identifier for a person, much like each publication has a DOI or PMID (PubMed ID) in PubMed. Take a look at this 4 minute ORCiD video for an introduction to its benefits.
ORCiD provides persistent digital identifiers to distinguish researchers from each other and enables machine-readable connections with scholarly works, organizations and other person/researcher identifiers. Creating an ORCiD iD takes just 30 seconds and requires only your name and email address. Once you have an ORCiD iD you can easily populate your works to your ORCiD profile and make connections between your ORCiD iD and various publishers, funders, professional associations and data repositories.
Some benefits of having an ORCiD iD include:
• Alleviates mistaken identity
• Creates connections (unambiguous links) between you and your works
• Improves discoverability – and recognition – of your research outputs
• Saves time – less repetitive data entry in multiple systems
• Owned and controlled by the researcher
• Implemented globally by publishers, funders, universities, and more
There’s more information on the Ebling web site and/or contact Trisha Adamus, Ebling Librarian and ORCiD Ambassador for UW-Madison, to learn more about ORCiD or to schedule a presentation on ORCiD for your research group at adamus@wisc.edu