Have you ever wondered what your ORCID iD is doing while you’re busy conducting experiments, analyzing sources, or teaching?
It’s easy to think of your ORCID record as a static digital CV—just a webpage that sits waiting to be read. But in the modern research ecosystem, the data found in your ORCID record is surprisingly active—and mobile! You might even think of it as a digital passport, zipping between disconnected systems, ensuring that institutions know who you are and that you get credit for your work without endlessly having to re-type the same information.
Many of the institutions you work with can add and manage your data on your behalf, such as the journal that adds your publications, or your university that adds and updates your employment or education, or your funders that add your grants. But what does this look like in action?
Let’s follow the journey of ORCID data during a typical (we admit, superhumanly productive and suspiciously uneventful) “day” in the life of a researcher we’ll call Dr. Sofia Maria Hernandez-Garcia (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5727-2427).
08:30: Manuscript submission
Sofia starts her day submitting a new manuscript to the Journal of Future Sciences. Because she has a compound surname, she often worries about her work being indexed incorrectly or attributed to a different S. Hernandez. Manuscript submissions systems typically ask for details such as name, institutional affiliations, and publication history, and this one is no different. However, right in the publisher’s user interface, Sofia sees a button with ORCID’s green “iD” icon: “Sign in with ORCID.” She might not realize it, but her data is about to take its first trip of the day.
By the way, many systems will also have a button that says, “Create or connect your ORCID iD”, meaning Sofia could create her ORCID iD right from there if she needed to!
But since Sofia already has her ORCID iD, she clicks the sign-in button and enters her username and password. Behind the scenes, an authenticated “handshake” occurs. The publisher’s system instantly pulls her verified name and current affiliation directly from her ORCID record. The data has successfully traveled from her ORCID record to its destination—the manuscript submission form—ensuring the publisher knows exactly which S. Hernandez-Garcia is submitting the paper, eliminating name ambiguity right at the start.
She notices that the manuscript submission form allows her to add her co-authors’ ORCID iDs, so she does a quick search for their records on ORCID.org and enters them, triggering a process within the publisher’s system to then authenticate with each of her co-authors via an implemented email workflow. Now the publisher has a persistent link not only to her identity, but to her co-authors’ as well, ensuring the work is attributed correctly to all of them, no matter how common their names may be.
10:30: Setting the groundwork with a DMP
Now that her manuscript has been submitted, it’s time for Sofia to finalize a Data Management Plan (DMP) for a new project she’s working on. Similar to what she did with her publisher, she signs into a DMP platform with her ORCID username and password. As she creates her plan, the system generates a “Machine-Actionable DMP” (maDMP) and links it directly to her ORCID record. Once she has done that, the DMP platform will add it to the Works section of her record on her behalf, like this:
Her ORCID iD is now firmly incorporated directly into the project’s structure, making it easy for her institution and future funders to see she has a structured plan for her data right from the start.
13:00: Uploading research into a data repository
After a successful pilot study, Sofia is ready to upload some raw datasets to her preferred data repository. To do this, she signs in with her ORCID iD (once again, the same way she did with her publisher and DMP tool!), and includes the ORCID iDs for her co-researchers. As the repository registers a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for each dataset, it attaches all of these ORCID iDs to the metadata. This metadata ensures that no matter how far the datasets travel or who downloads them, proper credit is permanently linked to the right researchers.
Once the dataset is live, the repository adds the metadata—including the dataset’s DOI—back to Sofia’s and her co-researchers’ ORCID records. This automatically updates all of their ORCID records with a new “Research Resource” or “Work” entry. None of the researchers had to type a single citation. Below are two examples of what Sofia and her team might see in their records:
15:00: The institutional update
While Sofia is grabbing a coffee a few hours later (or perhaps a few months later in real-time), Sofia’s paper is accepted and published. This triggers the next leg of the data journey.
Because Sofia granted permission during the manuscript submission process, the publisher’s system now automatically adds the new article’s metadata—the DOI, title, and journal name—directly onto Sofia’s ORCID record.
Simultaneously, her university’s Research Information System (RIMS/CRIS/eRA) has been hard at work behind the scenes. Because her university is an ORCID member organization, their RIMS periodically scans her ORCID record. It notices the new DMP from the DMP platform, the dataset from the repository, and the accepted manuscript entry added to her record by the publisher. The university system automatically imports all of this data into Sofia’s internal faculty profile, so when it’s time for her annual performance review, much of the data is already there, verified and ready.
Sofia didn’t lift a finger. In fact, she is still enjoying her coffee as her data travels from all of these external systems, to her ORCID record, and finally to her institution’s reporting system in a seamless path.
16:45: The grant application
To end her day, Sofia is finalizing a grant proposal for a national funding agency. The online application portal requires a five-year publication history and a list of current employment.
The necessary process of finding, formatting, and pasting dozens of citations is time-intensive, tedious, and exhausting. Fortunately, the funding agency is an ORCID member and has integrated their grant application system with the ORCID Registry. She authorizes the application portal to “Read her record.“
She is pleased to see that instantly, all of her ORCID data—including her datasets and that brand-new article from earlier in the day, as well as her verified employment history added by her university—flows into the grant application fields. The data populates the forms accurately, saving Sofia hours of administrative drudgery and ensuring the reviewers see a verified track record.
What used to take hours or even days of formatting takes a few clicks.
Infusing the research ecosystem with Trust Markers
By the end of this “day” in Sofia’s research career, her ORCID data has visited five different external systems across the scholarly ecosystem. It has served as an authenticator, a conduit for new information, and a trusted source for a CV. What’s more, as all these systems—publisher, data repositories, institutional, and funder—add data back to Sofia’s profile, that data is accompanied by a Trust Marker. These can be easily visualized via the Record Summary at the top of each ORCID record.
Even as awareness of how important Trust Markers can be to bolster trust in the scholarly record, it’s equally important to understand that they are not intended to be a verdict on a researcher’s integrity. Instead, they are designed to surface provenance of data, showing how it was added, either by an external source (in other words, a trusted ORCID member organization) via an authenticated connection, or manually entered by the researcher themselves. Please remember there will always be completely valid reasons for researchers to self-assert data. Perhaps their institution is not yet an ORCID member, or they come from a region that has limited resources to develop technical integrations, or maybe they are adding historical data about another affiliation.
ORCID’s goal is not to eliminate self-asserted data, but to reduce the effort it takes for organizations to add the validated data they hold about their researchers in the first place. As more and more trusted organizations add data, the volume of Trust Markers in ORCID records grows, further reducing downstream administrative burden for researchers while creating a more reliable, automated scholarly record for everyone.
But what if you’re not able to interact with external scholarly systems the way Sofia does during her typical research “day”? Reach out to your institutions and request that they integrate their system with ORCID. By doing this, and by making sure your ORCID record is connected and updated, you aren’t just maintaining an online CV, you are fueling an interconnected engine that makes managing your research career faster and less burdensome, not to mention more accurate and transparent.
