ORCID Membership

ORCID has become a critical part of the digital infrastructure needed for researchers to share information on a global scale. We enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique identifier (an “ORCID iD”) associated with an ORCID record for individual researchers to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.

In order to offset costs necessary to sustain and improve the registry, as well as to deliver the services required to fulfill our mission of connecting research and researchers, ORCID relies on membership funding from the research community. We have over 1,100 members, including research organizations, publishers, funders, professional associations, and other stakeholders in the research ecosystem and are growing strong! Learn more about how we set our fees here.

ORCID membership is open to any organization interested in integrating ORCID identifiers. All member fees are used to sustain and develop ORCID for the benefit of the global research community.

Membership Tiers

ORCID offers two membership tiers for organizations— Basic and Premium (direct and through consortia) — that provide a number of useful benefits. Both tiers allow access to the Member API (Application Programming Interface), which allows your systems and applications to connect to the ORCID registry, including reading from and writing to individual ORCID records with the users permission. 

Both tiers include varying levels of data access, customized integration support, user acceptance testing, as well as a monthly newsletter exclusively for all members, invitations to member-only events hosted by ORCID, and eligibility for nomination for ORCID Board elections.

	Public API	Basic Member API	Premium Member API
Client credentials	1 public API credential	1 member API credential	5 member API credentials
Access to sandbox test environment
Reading ORCID data
Provide Single Sign On (SSO)
Collect Authenticated iDs
Search and retrieve public data
Access trusted data (see Visibility settings) Subject to permissions granted by iD holders
See if a user signed in using 2FA
Public Data File access
Public data file synchronization on demand
Receive update notifications
Add/Update/delete information from ORCID records.
Add information to an ORCID record*
Update/delete the information you’ve added to a record
Support
Knowledge Base including technical documentation, tutorials, and reference documents
Use cases, best practices, sample communications
Membership of the API Users listserv
Invitations to public events hosted by ORCID
Integration support			(priority queue)
Webinar-style orientation meetings
Integrated user acceptance testing in preparation for launches and releases		1 integration	5 integrations
Other Benefits
Monthly Newsletter
Analytics Reports		2/year	Monthly. Personalized, including email domain stats.
Invitations to private ORCID events, such as member town hall meetings
May submit nominations for representative to serve on ORCID Board
Voting rights in annual ORCID Board election
Participation in current or upcoming Steering Groups and Working Groups and ORCID-hosted virtual and in-person community events

*Subject to permissions granted by iD record holders.

Help me choose!

To encourage small and start-up organizations to embed iDs, organizations with less than US $200,000 in revenue in their last fiscal year are eligible for a 75% discount on basic or premium membership. Non-profit organizations are eligible for a 20% member fee discount on basic or premium membership fees. Discounts will be evaluated at each membership renewal. Non-profit and start-up discounts are not applied to premium consortium agreements.

We also offer premium memberships through ORCID consortia. Membership through one of the consortia provides many benefits including access to the Affiliation Manager tool and lower membership fees for most institutions, compared to a direct premium membership. Learn more about ORCID consortia membership below.

*Consider joining ORCID through a consortia and save on annual membership fees.

ORCID Consortia

Groups of organizations interested in a coordinated approach to ORCID implementation; or in customized orientations, workshops, and follow-up with the ORCID staff to support integration efforts, as well as reduced fees and access to the Affiliation Manager, might be interested in joining or forming a consortium. Learn more here.