ORCID
Encyclopedia
ORCID is a proposed nonproprietary alphanumeric code
that would uniquely identify scientific
and other academic author
s. This will remove the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature
can be hard to electronically recognize as most personal name
s are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing system
s. It would provide for humans a persistent identity — an "author DOI" — similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifier
s (DOIs).
It is intended to offer an open and independent registry that will be the de facto standard for author identification in science and related academic publishing
.
for its ResearcherID
system. An independent organization will run the eventual production system and assign ORCIDs to individuals. ORCID is planned to be freely usable by any such group, and interoperable with their ID systems.
Other schemes for contributor ID have been proposed including the International Standard Name Identifier, under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization
, which would uniquely identify contributors to book
s, television programmes, and newspaper
s.
far beyond the simple publication list."
in Nature
that ORCID in addition to tagging the contributions scientists make to papers that it "could also be assigned to data sets they helped to generate, comments on their colleagues’ blog posts or unpublished draft papers, edits of Wikipedia entries and much else besides."
Alphanumeric code
In general, in computing, an alphanumeric code is a series of letters and numbers which are written in a form that can be processed by a computer....
that would uniquely identify scientific
Scientist
A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...
and other academic author
Academic authorship
Academic authorship of journal articles, books and other original works is a means by which academics communicate the results of their scholarly work, establish priority for their discoveries, and build their reputation among their peers. Authorship is a primary basis on which many academics are...
s. This will remove the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature
Scientific literature
Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...
can be hard to electronically recognize as most personal name
Personal name
A personal name is the proper name identifying an individual person, and today usually comprises a given name bestowed at birth or at a young age plus a surname. It is nearly universal for a human to have a name; except in rare cases, for example feral children growing up in isolation, or infants...
s are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s. It would provide for humans a persistent identity — an "author DOI" — similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifier
Digital object identifier
A digital object identifier is a character string used to uniquely identify an object such as an electronic document. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found...
s (DOIs).
It is intended to offer an open and independent registry that will be the de facto standard for author identification in science and related academic publishing
Academic publishing
Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in journal article, book or thesis form. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted is often called...
.
Development
At present ORCID is being organized by the Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative. The prototype is planned to be run on software used already by Thomson ReutersThomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a provider of information for the world's businesses and professionals and is created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of Reuters Group on 17 April 2008. Thomson Reuters is headquartered at 3 Times Square, New York City, USA...
for its ResearcherID
ResearcherID
ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters.This unique identifier aims at solving the problem of author identification. In scientific literature it is common to cite name, surname, and initials of the authors of an...
system. An independent organization will run the eventual production system and assign ORCIDs to individuals. ORCID is planned to be freely usable by any such group, and interoperable with their ID systems.
Other schemes for contributor ID have been proposed including the International Standard Name Identifier, under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...
, which would uniquely identify contributors to book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
s, television programmes, and newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
s.
Uses
It is hoped to aid "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". Another suggested use is to provide each researcher with "a constantly updated ‘digital curriculum vitae’ providing a picture of his or her contributions to science goingfar beyond the simple publication list."
Other uses
It has been noted in an editorialEditorial
An opinion piece is an article, published in a newspaper or magazine, that mainly reflects the author's opinion about the subject. Opinion pieces are featured in many periodicals.-Editorials:...
in Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
that ORCID in addition to tagging the contributions scientists make to papers that it "could also be assigned to data sets they helped to generate, comments on their colleagues’ blog posts or unpublished draft papers, edits of Wikipedia entries and much else besides."
ORCID group
The founding parties of the Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative include:- American Institute of PhysicsAmerican Institute of PhysicsThe American Institute of Physics promotes science, the profession of physics, publishes physics journals, and produces publications for scientific and engineering societies. The AIP is made up of various member societies...
- American Psychological AssociationAmerican Psychological AssociationThe American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
- Association for Computing MachineryAssociation for Computing MachineryThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
- British LibraryBritish LibraryThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
- CrossRefCrossRefCrossRef is an official Digital Object Identifier Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. It was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-publisher citation linking in online academic journals.-Background:CrossRef has who...
- ElsevierElsevierElsevier is a publishing company which publishes medical and scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has operations in the United Kingdom, USA and elsewhere....
- EMBOEmboFor the scientific organisation, see European Molecular Biology Organization.Embo is a village in the Highland Council Area in Scotland and the former/postal county of Sutherland, about 2 miles NNE of Dornoch....
- European Organization for Nuclear Research
- Hindawi
- MendeleyMendeleyMendeley is a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers. Mendeley requires the user to...
- Microsoft Corporation
- MIT LibrariesMIT LibrariesThe library system of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology covers all five academic schools comprising the university...
- Nature Publishing GroupNature Publishing GroupNature Publishing Group is an international publishing company that publishes academic journals, online databases, and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine...
- ProQuestProQuestProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based electronic publisher and microfilm publisher.It provides archives of sources such as newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and aggregated databases of many types. Its content is estimated at 125 billion digital pages...
- Public Library of SciencePublic Library of ScienceThe Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license...
- RefWorksRefWorksRefWorks is a web-based commercial citation manager — an application for managing references, retrieving bibliographic information, and designing texts in terms of their literature references...
- Royal Society of ChemistryRoyal Society of ChemistryThe Royal Society of Chemistry is a learned society in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemical sciences." It was formed in 1980 from the merger of the Chemical Society, the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Faraday Society and the Society for Analytical Chemistry with a new...
- Rutgers UniversityRutgers UniversityRutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
- SAGE PublicationsSAGE PublicationsSAGE is an independent academic publisher of books, journals, and electronic products in the humanities and social sciences and the scientific, technical, and medical fields. SAGE was founded in 1965 by George McCune and Sara Miller McCune. The company is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California,...
- SLAC National Accelerator LaboratorySLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryThe SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S...
- SpringerSpringer Science+Business Media- Selected publications :* Encyclopaedia of Mathematics* Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete * Graduate Texts in Mathematics * Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique...
- Thomson ReutersThomson ReutersThomson Reuters Corporation is a provider of information for the world's businesses and professionals and is created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of Reuters Group on 17 April 2008. Thomson Reuters is headquartered at 3 Times Square, New York City, USA...
- Universitats Bibliothek
- University College LondonUniversity College LondonUniversity College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
- Wellcome TrustWellcome TrustThe Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 as an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. With an endowment of around £13.9 billion, it is the United Kingdom's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research...
- WileyJohn Wiley & SonsJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and...
See also
- Digital Author IdentificationDigital Author IdentificationThe Digital Author Identification system assigns a unique number to all authors in the Dutch research system. The DAI links the PICA database in institutional libraries with the METIS national research information system....
- International Standard Name Identifier
- OpenIDOpenIDOpenID is an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, eliminating the need for services to provide their own ad hoc systems and allowing users to consolidate their digital identities...
- ResearcherIDResearcherIDResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters.This unique identifier aims at solving the problem of author identification. In scientific literature it is common to cite name, surname, and initials of the authors of an...
- VIAF