ORCID launched more than a decade ago, but has yet to fulfil its potential

Jonas Müller knows all too well the drawbacks of having a common family name. In his home country of Germany, more than half a million people share his name. He also shares it with dozens of astrophysics researchers, in Germany and abroad.

That wouldn’t really be a problem if he was a carpenter, a hockey player or a nurse, but Müller is just beginning his research career, working towards a PhD at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany, where he is studying the evolution of stars. The chances that his work might be misattributed to the dozens of other ‘J. Müllers’ across his discipline are high. For that reason, he signed up for ORCID.

ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, was launched in 2012 as a free identification service for individuals to record their academic papers and other research activities. Researchers receive a unique 16-digit identifier that they carry with them for the entirety of their career, even if they change their name, job or institute. The platform is run by ORCID, a non-profit organization based in Bethesda, Maryland, and is funded through fees paid by member organizations. These comprise more than 1,450 stakeholders in the research ecosystem, including publishers, funders, professional associations and research organizations.

Since ORCID’s launch, its lime-green logo has become a familiar sight on academic publishing websites and funding applications around the world. The service, which has some 10 million yearly active researchers — people who use it at least once a year — allows users to link publications, data sets, peer reviews, grants and other scholarly outputs in a single webpage and is integrated with many institutional repositories and publishers’ platforms.

But ORCID uptake is inconsistent between fields and career stages, and many researchers aren’t using it beyond their initial sign-up. Data from ORCID show that roughly half of active global ORCID profiles include publication data, and 69% are linked to affiliation data, such as information on employment and education. Just 35% of profiles include data on both publications and affiliations, however.

Stephen Porter, a higher-education researcher at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says that although the appeal of ORCID is strong for researchers, more needs to be done to convince them to sign up in the first place, and to keep their profiles updated. “I think most scientists would agree [that ORCID] is a useful thing — but it’s very different when it comes to them actually going out and not only registering but keeping track of it.”

Who’s signing up for ORCID?

Porter led a study¹, published in April, that surveyed almost 4,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty members across 31 public research universities in the United States. The results show high uptake among survey respondents in natural-sciences subjects, such as biological and biomedical sciences (93%), physical sciences (91%) and psychology (89%), and low uptake in humanities subjects, such as English language and literature (24%) and visual and performing arts (17%).

Assistant professors were found to be more likely to have an ORCID number (80%) than were associate professors (67%) or full professors (71%). Porter and his co-authors suggest that the high adoption rates by early-career researchers are due either to their greater familiarity with technology or to their increased need for self-promotion as they work to secure tenure.

When asked why they signed up to ORCID, 29% of survey respondents said it was a requirement when submitting a paper to a specific journal. ORCID itself reports a much higher number globally, noting that “about 75% of registrations occur because journals are asking authors to include their ORCID in new submissions”.

Major publishers, including Springer Nature, Wiley, PLOS and the Royal Society, have integrated ORCID into their submission systems, and their journals require or strongly encourage authors to submit with an ORCID number.

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Simon Porter, vice-president of research futures at the technology company Digital Science in London and a member of the ORCID advisory board, says that rather than putting the onus on users to manually update their profiles, systems and institutions should support researchers in not just signing up, but also using ORCID. “The simple act of publishing work with an ORCID should be all that’s required to update the ORCID record” and other research-management systems, he says.

Alice Meadows, co-founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative, a scholarly communications consultancy in Chichester, UK, and a former director of communications and community engagement for ORCID, agrees. ORCID was always designed to be used in conjunction with other systems, she writes in an article published by the Scholarly Kitchen in July. “It’s ORCID and, not ORCID or,” she writes.

Countries that have linked ORCID to national research systems have shown success in increasing the amount of data attached to ORCID profiles. For example, Portugal’s science-funding agency, the Foundation for Science and Technology, has been promoting ORCID since 2013, and later integrated it with its national scientific CV platform, CIÊNCIAVITAE.