At the end of 2025, we find ourselves not only gearing up for a fresh year of work ahead, but also for the start of our new strategic planning cycle—that will carry ORCID forward into the next four years. We will be sharing more about our new plan—ORCID 2030: Empowering the Future of Research—in early 2026, but for now, I would like to take a little time to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished in 2025, and more broadly over the past four years as we wrap up our work under our current strategic plan—From Vision to Value: ORCID’s 2022–2025 Strategic Plan.
Of course, the progress we’ve been able to make over these last four years is in large part because of the participation of our stakeholders: our 1,500+ organizational members in 69 countries, our 10.5M active users around the world, and our network of partners throughout the scholarly community. We are deeply grateful for your help and support.
Charting a strategic course: From vision to value
Our 2022–25 strategy was built around the understanding that while the promise of ORCID remained true—that ORCID creates value for the research community by enabling the collection, connection, and reuse of persistent identifiers and researcher profile data under the ultimate control of researchers themselves—more work was needed to incentivize uptake and adoption. Whether through saving researchers time and effort by encouraging reuse of their data, making it easier for them to maintain their ORCID records, or making the ORCID data easier and more valuable to re-use, we needed to do more to help the community derive value from the effort they were putting in to participating in ORCID.
We learned from our members that their ability to benefit from ORCID was often challenged by the “chicken and egg” problem: until there were enough fully populated, sufficiently complete ORCID records, and enough integrated systems, the value that stakeholders could gain from participating with ORCID was limited.
The core of our strategic focus from 2022–25 was therefore to build commitment to and engagement with ORCID as an essential element of the research experience, both for researchers and members. The strategy was expressed through four strategic themes:
1. Increasing Value to Members
2. Increasing Value to Researchers
3. Increasing Global Participation
4. Upholding Trust and Integrity
In 2023, we added a fifth, more internally focused strategic theme:
5. Increasing Staff Engagement
In this post, I’d like to take a look back at what we’ve achieved, together as a community, over not just in 2025, but the past four years.
Highlights from 2022-25
Strategic Theme: Increasing Value to Members
To help our members get more value out of ORCID, in 2022 we rolled out a new tool to our member organizations, the Affiliation Manager, which enables universities and research institutions to add validated affiliation data to their researchers’ records without the overhead of taking on technical integration work.
Later, recognizing the need to stay ahead of the research integrity crisis with the rise of generative AI and paper mills, we clarified ORCID’s role as part of the solution to the problem through our Community Trust Network—the network of validated data added to ORCID records by our member organizations that helps researchers demonstrate their track records and their trustworthiness. We are proud to have coined the phrase Trust Markers to help our community articulate this concept more easily to their
peer—a term which has now entered common use in discussions of scholarly integrity—and for receiving recognition at the inaugural 2025 EPIC Awards presented by Society for Scholarly Publishing for our communications campaign in this area.
Another major initiative that allowed our member organizations to more easily contribute the data they hold about their researchers to their records came in 2023 with the relaunch of our revamped Certified Service Provider (CSP) program. Through the CSP program, we’ve been able to successfully encourage many of the tools and platforms that our member organizations already use—whether commercial or open-source—to strengthen their ORCID integrations to follow community-defined, workflow specific best practices.
Through the combined effect of these initiatives, we’ve seen an astounding 60% increase in the number of member organizations adding data to researchers’ ORCID records.
Further, to help our members encourage their researchers to use ORCID, we improved consortia support materials, created online training modules for consortia staff, and introduced a new asset management platform to ease sharing and re-use of outreach resources. We also restructured and enhanced our webinar program, introducing topical series such as I’m a Member, Now What?!, Enabling Value, ORCID in the Wild, Research Integrity, and Ask Me Anything, all now available for streaming in our ORCID On-Demand library, with expanded support for non-English language events.
We also worked to support our member organizations by building our relationships with government research policy makers and funding organizations around the world. Notably, we met with key US government institutions, succeeding in getting the use of Persistent Identifiers like ORCID included in guidance issued to the US Federal Funding agencies by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and subsequent adoption of ORCID in many of the major US funding agencies’ policies.
Strategic Theme: Increasing Value to Researchers
To help researchers gain more value from ORCID, we first “fixed the basics,” improving the speed and responsiveness of the Registry, followed by making much-needed accessibility upgrades. We then switched our focus to reducing the amount of effort that researchers need to invest to keep their ORCID records up to date. We added automations that suggest affiliations for researchers to add to their profiles based on the work email domains; then we took this a step further by adding functionality to automatically derive verified email domain information from work email addresses without compromising privacy. The resulting verified email domain affiliation now gives researchers a Trust Marker, helping researchers add validated data to their own records, even if their institution does not have an integration with ORCID or is even an ORCID member.
Another priority was to incentivize researcher participation in ORCID by encouraging the re-use of ORCID profile data in systems that require it, which helps reduce administrative burden and save time for researchers. For example, as part of our Certified Service Provider program, we now require Manuscript Submission, Grant/Facility Application Management, and Research Information Management systems to re-use data in ORCID profiles in order to achieve CSP status.
We’re pleased that a number of third-party studies, looking at the research landscapes in the UK, Australia and Ireland, demonstrate the huge efficiency savings to be gained from the adoption of ORCID and other PIDs in key research information workflows.
To help researchers better represent themselves in their ORCID profiles, and following feedback from our community and the great insights of our Researcher Advisory Council (ORAC), we made some significant changes to the ORCID User Interface. First, we moved professional activity affiliation types into a new section within the ORCID record called Professional activities, grouping the previous categories of Membership, Service, Invited Positions, and Distinctions. Then we added a long-awaited new work-types taxonomy to support research outputs that are often created by arts and humanities scholars. This year, we’ve added a new Featured Works section for researchers to display their top five outputs and added a new section for Editorial Service that gives credit to journal editors for their scholarly service.
Strategic Theme: Increasing Global Participation
In 2022, we launched our Global Participation Program, which introduced a Membership Equity Program (MEP) that for the first time offered membership fee discounts to our consortia members based on affordability in their region, as well as our Global Participation Fund (GPF), which was created from $1.5M in loans forgiven by 13 of the initial lenders that provided start-up funding to ORCID in 2011–13.
Thus far, we have awarded GPF recipients more than $550K in grants to nearly 30 organizations in 19 countries through our two grant programs for Community Development & Outreach and Technical Integration. The relationships built with our grantees have been key in establishing new and stronger ORCID communities of practice in the Global South, particularly in Africa and have led to the creation of three new ORCID consortia: the Ugandan ORCID Consortium, the Nigerian ORCID Consortium and the ORCID-ASREN Regional Consortium, serving the North Africa and the Arab world.
The Regional Consortia program is another success from our efforts to increase global participation, as it allows organizations from multiple countries to join ORCID under one regional umbrella. This enables us to support ORCID communities of practice in under-represented regions where there may be insufficient capacity to support a national consortium. As well as the newly launched ORCID-ASREN Consortium, our Latin American Caribbean Regional Consortium has been going from strength to strength, now with 99 members from eight different countries.
Lastly, we made it easier for our community to get the information they need about ORCID in their own language by increasing support in the ORCID user interface from 12 languages to 15, and introducing translations for our informational content and our Help Center. We now support the languages used by approximately 95% of our users.
Strategic Theme: Upholding Trust and Integrity
In the past four years, we have significantly increased the resilience and reliability of our technical infrastructure. After 10 months of preparation, we carefully transitioned the Registry to Amazon Web Services in 2024. We have also ramped up our focus on cybersecurity, launching a formal 30-month cybersecurity program to improve our ability to prevent, detect, respond, and recover from all manner of ever-growing cybersecurity threats.
Another important aspect of our resiliency is ensuring our long-term financial stability. Since 2022, we’ve increased our organizational membership base from 1,232 to 1,518 organizations today. This growth in the financial support of our community has enabled us to designate a long-term capital reserve fund, distinct from operating cash needs for the first time, aiming to support ORCID’s persistence and sustainability long into the future.
Privacy, while not specifically called out as a strategic priority in our plan, is nonetheless very important to maintaining the trust of our community. In 2023, we hired our first Data Protection Officer, rolled out the EU Standard Contractual Clauses to all of our members in the EU, Switzerland, and the UK to maintain compliance with GDPR international data transfer regulations. In 2024 we overhauled our privacy policy for the first time in ORCID’s history, greatly improving its clarity and readability.
Lastly, our fifth strategic pillar, added in 2023, was Improving Staff Engagement, recognizing that without our superb and talented team, we wouldn’t be able to achieve anything. We’ve improved and enhanced staff benefits, increasing equity across locations, and worked hard to maintain and grow ORCID’s culture and shared values.
On behalf of the ORCID Board and staff, I would like to thank our entire global community of stakeholders for the generous support of ORCID’s mission, vision, and values. I am tremendously proud of the progress we have made since 2022—only achieved with the commitment and support of our community of members, researchers, supporters, and advocates around the world. As we embark on ORCID’s next era, I am looking forward to sharing more about our plans for ORCID’s next four years in early 2026 as we work together to “empower the future of research.”
