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ORCID iDs

Scholarly Communication Librarian

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Ellen Dubinsky

ORCID iDWhat is ORCID?

ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor Identifier) is an international, interdisciplinary, open, non-proprietary, and not-for-profit institution. ORCID enables transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations by providing an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.

What is an ORCID iD?

  • A persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers and ensures your research outputs and activities are correctly attributed to you.
  • Your ORCID iD is yours throughout your career, no matter where you work, who funds you, whether your name or field of research changes, or if your names appears in different forms in different places.
  • You control your ORCID iD. You control when and where you use your iD. You manage connections to your iD, including deciding who gets to add what information, and whether and by whom this data may be viewed and accessed.

 

Why is an ORCID account important?

  • Your ORCID iD distinguishes you from all other researchers, especially those with a similar or the same name.
  • ORCID saves time by reducing repetitive data entry. You can link your ORCID account with trusted parties. Once linked, these systems can push information back and forth – saving you time from re-entering citation information.
  • ORCID is more universal than other researcher profile systems (such as Google Scholar, Scopus Author Identifier, or ResearcherID from Clarivate).
  • More and more publishers are providing options to link authors’ and reviewers’ ORCID iDs in their manuscript submission systems. Some publishers are starting to mandate use of ORCID iDs for authors. (ORCID maintains a list of publishers that require an ORCID iD.)
  • Funders are starting to adopt ORCID in their funding application process. This includes the National Institutes of Health (see below).

 

Other Reasons this Matters

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Faculty Portfolio (formerly UA Vitae) can import data (such as your publications, employment affiliations, and education affiliations) from your ORCID record.

You can use your ORCID record to quickly populate your SciENcv Biosketch.

SciENcv logo

Federal funding agencies are increasingly recommending or requiring that applicants use SciENcv to create Biosketches and other forms for use in the grant application submission and reporting processes. The NSF will only accept applications with Biosketches and Current and Pending (Other) Support forms prepared using SciENcv. NIH and other federal funding agencies will soon require SciENcv biosketches and forms as well.

 

Requirements for ORCID

The 2022 OSTP Memo and subsequent guidance documents require federal funding agencies to collect and provide public access to both the metadata, publications, and data generated as a result from federally funded research projects. The metadata requirements include not only the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for outputs like publications and data (such as DOIs) but also the use of PIDS for researchers (such as ORCID iDs).

Several government agencies have already begun requiring the use of ORCID iDs for researchers. All U.S. federal funding agencies will require the use of PIDs for researchers as of January 1, 2026.

The U of A Research Security Office has issued a requirement that all Investigators have an ORCID account connected to the University of Arizona.