Another major milestone for ORCID
At the end of 2012, just three months after we launched the ORCID registry, we were thrilled to be able to share that nearly 50,000 researchers had already registered for an iD. Ten months after that, we celebrated the ORCID record growing to nearly 250,000 (with 80 Members!) All told, it took us just a little over two years to grow to 1,000,000 iDs, and nine months after that, in 2015, we hit 1.5 million iDs.
Since 2015 we’ve been steadily growing and exceeding even our own high expectations:
- In 2015, the record grew by 788,650 records,
- In 2016, by 1,068,295,
- In 2017, 1,388,796,
- In 2018, it grew by 1,585,851,
- In 2019, by 2,006,672, and
- In 2020 (so far), it’s grown by 2,293,631!
And just last week ORCID hit another major milestone: 10 million registered ORCID iDs!
Insights that show impact
As happy as we are about this milestone, we’re even more excited to see what answers we can unlock from the growing ORCID record, and how we can use the insights we gain to help researchers even more. How many of those 10 million ORCID iDs are actively being updated, and how many of those ORCID records are being updated by members? Which ones have some kind of work associated with them or an affiliation or funding? How many have taken advantage of the Peer Review feature?
We already know researchers don’t want to spend time managing their profiles in multiple systems and duplicating the same data about what they’ve contributed to science or the humanities—they would rather be spending that time on research! 
Earlier this year, we launched a data platform to give us better insight into these questions and to guide us in our decision-making. The more we understand how researchers are using their iDs, the better positioned we are to make effective decisions around product and service development, user design, or even training content.
Though we are going to be offering these interactive graphs on our new website in 2021, we wanted to share a few of them with you to give you an idea of some of the things we are already learning.
Letting researchers do research
We’ve spent the first eight years of ORCID reaching 10 million iDs and are just beginning to explore and understand how researchers are using their records. Whatever we do next, our community can rest assured that the mission of ORCID will remain: keeping the researcher at the center of everything we do to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.
The most important thing we’ve learned so far is having an open, non-profit, transparently-governed, community-driven effort is the only way to garner enough trust to reach the level of success we have, and we are immensely grateful to our community of researchers, members, and consortia for taking this journey with us.