Growing up, I remember passing by the local hamburger chain (yes, the one with golden arches) and watching the sign tick up from “1 million served” and then switch over to counting in the billions.
While billions and billions should likely remain a statement about stars in the universe, I am very proud that ORCID has reached the earthly milestone of 1.5 million iDs served.
First, I thank you, the community, for your continued interest, support, and engagement. We now have over 300 organizational members and a similar number of member-built identifier “collection points”, making it that much easier for researchers to connect their iD with their contributions. We’ve showcased a number of these implementations on our Member Support Center.
Thanks to generous support from the Helmsley Trust and the European Commission, we’ve been able to build our team to meet community demand, and now have technical and outreach staff in Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa, and Europe. We’ve been racking up lots and lots of air miles to meet with you (five continents in as many months for me!), and the regional teams have started a series of regional workshops to bring ORCID to your area.
Our technical team has been busy, launching peer review acknowledgements and an updated API and, coming later this year, support for federated login. We are also pleased to see the community using our record update API, and are looking forward to launches soon by CrossRef and DataCite that will automatically update ORCID records with published papers and datasets for which the author included their ORCID iD.
Together, we are getting a LOT closer to seamless interoperability between research information systems, improved discoverability, and reduced reporting workload for researchers. Let’s keep reaching for the stars!