Understanding the impact of your funding programs is vital to your strategy, program design, and mission alignment. By embedding ORCID iDs in your funding workflows, you can reliably connect your awardee’s and funding programs—as well as saving everyone time and reducing errors caused by manual keying of information. Using ORCID in your system(s), you can play your part in building a trusted research information infrastructure by asserting connections between individuals and the grants you award them.
A funding workflow will typically follow the workflow below:
- The applicant applies for a grant via the funders grant system
- The funder collects the authenticated author’s ORCID iD and requests permission to interact with the applicants record, and stores that permission.
- The funder collects data from the applicants record using the ORCID API and uses it to help populate the proposal/submission form. This helps to save the author time manually completing information that is already available within their ORCID record.
- If the funding is approved then the funder adds the funding to the awardee’s ORCID record
- The funder can then track and evaluate research results using the data from the awardee’s ORCID record over time
Example

Benefits
Not only can this reduce the drudgery of form-filling for researchers, it also ensures that funder names are used in a standard way, and makes it possible for publishers to streamline the capture of funding information. This information can then be used to automate reporting processes, saving time, shortening the reporting cycle, and increasing accuracy and completeness.
Our ORBIT project aimed to increase the efficiency of grant application workflows; improve the ease of program data collection; and promote research rigor and reproducibility. ORCID and the funder working group produced a report with their findings and recommendations
More information
How do I collect an authenticated ID?
You collect authenticated IDs when you ask a researcher to sign in with their ORCID iD. This process uses a technology called “OAuth” or “SSO” and should be built into your workflow.
See the API Tutorial ‘Get an Authenticated ORCID iD‘ for more details.
How do I request permission to update an ORCID record?
The process to get permission to add or update data on a user’s ORCID record uses OAuth, as described in our 3 Legged OAuth FAQ. Only ORCID members can use the Member API to ask for update permissions. In simple terms it works like this:
- Your local system creates a special link
- When clicked, the user is sent to ORCID, signs in and grants permission
- ORCID sends the user back to your system with an ‘authorization code’
- Your system exchanges that code for an ‘access token’
- The access token lets you update the user’s record
How do I add items to an ORCID record?
Items (works, employment, funding, peer review etc) can be added to an ORCID record using the ORCID member API. You need the following:
- The researchers permission
- Member API credentials
- And either:
- A vendor system that integrates with the ORCID Member API
- Your own system that integrates with the ORCID Member API
What should I communicate to my users?
To support the social component we offer a toolkit of Outreach Resources to help you develop a campaign to support your integration, and communicate to your researchers:
- What ORCID is.
- Why your system collects iDs and how your system will perform tasks, such as updating their records.
- Why your researchers will benefit by creating an ORCID iD and connecting their iDs to your system.
- How ORCID benefits the wider, global research community.
We will be continually building out this “library” of resources based on feedback from the community. If you have an idea for something you might like to see, please feel free to contact us.
Why should I collect authenticated ORCID iDs?
Collecting validated ORCID iDs for individuals through the OAUTH process is important. Individuals sign into their ORCID accounts using their registered email address and password or they can create a new account and then authorize your system to obtain their ORCID iD. This ensures you get the correct ORCID iD for the researcher and that the information on that record reflects their research activities (see What’s So Special About Signing In).
Why should I update ORCID records?
You can help make life easier for your users by connecting validated information to their ORCID records. You will also be helping to build trust in scholarly communications and, by keeping that data up to date, you can reduce the reporting burden for your users and improve data quality.
ORCID for Research Organisations
In addition to its use as a persistent identifier for your researchers, ORCID can help you take control of how your institution’s name is used across research systems. In combination with other persistent identifiers ORCID enables you to authoritatively assert your staff, faculty, and student affiliations with your institution. You can also use ORCID APIs to receive real-time notifications about research activities, to auto-update forms, and to follow your alumni’s careers.
ORCID for Funding Organisations
By embedding ORCID iDs in your funding workflows, you can reliably connect your grantees and funding programs — and save everyone time and reduce errors caused by manual keying of information. Using ORCID in your system(s), you can play your part in building a trusted research information infrastructure by asserting connections between individuals and the grants you award them.
ORCID for Publishers
Researchers are at the heart of everything that scholarly and research publishers do. Accurate author and reviewer information is vital to indexing, search and discovery, publication tracking, funding and resource use attribution, and supporting peer review.
ORCID serves as an information hub, enabling your authors and reviewers to reliably connect to their contributions, and to share information from their ORCID record as they interact with your publishing systems. Collecting iDs for all your authors and reviewers during the publication process — whether for books, journals, datasets, compositions, presentations, code, or a variety of other works — allows for information to be easily shared, ensures researchers can provide consent to share, saves researchers time and hassle, reduces the risk of errors and, critically, enables researchers to get the credit they deserve for the important work they’re doing.
What information does a funding item contain?
- Funding type:* The type of funding awarded, This field is selected from a list containing the following values: Award, Contract, Grant, Salary-award
- Funding title:* The title of the funding item
- Subtitle: A subtitle to the funding item
- Translated-title: The title the funding appears under in another language, the language of the translated title is recorded as an attribute
- Description: A description or short abstract of the funded project.
- Amount: The value of the award
- Unique funding identifier: Add as many of these as your system is aware, as it aids in grouping on ORCID records.
- Funding identifier type: Use grant-number, DOI, URI or proposal-id
- Value of the identifier
- Identifier URL (optional)
- Relationship: self/part-of
This is to indicate the relationship of the funding item to the identifier. For example, if the funding item is for one phase of a multi-part grant, and the identifier is for the multi-part grant, then the relationship would be “part-of”; if the identifier is for the individual phase, then the relationship would be “self”.
- Funding agency (organization):* Information about the organization that awarded the funding
- Name of the agency
- Address (city and country)
- Organization identifier:
- Start date: The date the funding began
- End date: The date the funding ended
- Contributors information: Information about the individuals who received the funding
- ORCID iD: The ORCID iD of each collaborator to the funding project; this should only include authenticated ORCID iDs
- Role: The nature of the contribution by the researcher
* Indicates required field
Technical documentation
A more detailed tutorial can be found here.