Open Researcher and Contributor Identification is an open, not-for-profit organization with the aim of supplying a persistent and unique identifier - an ORCID iD - to any individual who is involved in research, scholarship and innovation activities
Why register for ORCID?
- Publisher requirements: Many publishers already require an ORCID iD for submission in their journals, and more than 3000 journals already collect ORCID iD from their authors
- Funder requirements: Many funders, including the NRF require an ORCID iD when submitting funded research outputs. The NRF repository will use this unique identifier to link to publications and datasets in the future.
- Disambiguation: The ORCID iD can be used to uniquely identify an individual, irrespective of their chosen publication name (or spelling variations). This also ensures that credit for research is not given to someone by mistake.
- Grouping research together: All the research outputs of an individual can be grouped together on the ORCID record which is useful for reporting of all outputs to funders or publishers. Existing outputs can be imported from other platforms to the ORCID record.
- Increased discoverability: When a researcher attaches an ORCID iD to all outputs which stem from research (such as the final article, datasets, experiments or patents) all these outputs are linked together and to the individual researcher leading to better exposure and discoverability of the researchers' other activities
- Streamlined data entry: The idea is to 'input once, reuse often'. Once relevant systems are integrated with ORCID an automatic exchange of information can take place to populate other systems (for example from funding applications to repository systems to citation/statistics platforms)
- Single sign on to participating journals: As more publishers and content providers include ORCID in their workflows, the ORCID iD can be used as a method of authentication for those providers, removing the need to register on multiple platforms.
