The landscape of global research is always evolving, however the importance of connecting researchers with their scholarly contributions, and linking the organizations that facilitate, fund, or publish their research has not diminished.
Over the past 13 years ORCID has established itself as an essential piece of research infrastructure. Our dedication to enabling transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers and their work has earned us the trust of our community.
Our new strategic plan, ORCID 2030: Advancing the Future of Research, outlines our commitment to meeting the challenges and opportunities presented by this dynamic future and underscores a significant evolution in our focus, moving from a foundation of establishing trust and value to a more active, expansive role in empowering the future of research globally.
This plan introduces five distinct but interconnected Strategic Themes that will guide our work over the next four years. While these themes build on many of our past achievements—such as strengthening the Community Trust Network formed by our institutional members—they also represent our commitment to addressing a border set of challenges facing researchers, institutions, and the wider scholarly ecosystem.
- Empowering Researchers focuses on expanding the value we offer to researchers across all disciplines, making ORCID “smarter” to save them time, and helping them maximize the visibility and recognition of their diverse contributions.
- Connecting Research Information reinforces our core mission: to provide transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations, and by doing so, to be a crucial hub of high quality data that can benefit the entire global research community. This means working to improve the completeness and accuracy of ORCID data and optimizing the integrations of our member organizations—our Community Trust Network—so that ORCID can serve as the key source of verifiable identity and contribution data.
- Broadening our Community continues our essential work to foster global participation while strategically expanding ORCID’s relevance to new communities and use cases, including research security and research administration.
- Advancing Trust and Integrity remains the foundation of all our work. This theme reinforces our focus on external challenges which have become more urgent in recent years, emphasizing our role as a leader in helping to combat the crisis in research integrity through the open dissemination of Trust Markers, restating our neutrality in the fast-changing global research landscape, and exploring new opportunities in areas such as digital identity.
- Strengthening ORCID’s Resiliency ensures our long-term sustainability by focusing on financial growth and diversification, driving operational efficiency, ensuring robust cybersecurity, and the thoughtful application of emerging technologies such as AI.
Harnessing the power of Appreciative Inquiry for ORCID’s Future
In developing the plan for the next phase of ORCID’s growth and evolution, we adopted the SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results) strategic planning framework. SOAR is rooted in the principles of Appreciative Inquiry and positive psychology, representing a conscious shift from more traditional strength/weakness-based analysis towards a focus on identifying and harnessing the potential we have developed over the course of our existence.
SOAR is a powerful, inclusive methodology that emphasizes focusing on our current Strengths and favorable external Opportunities, aligning them directly with shared Aspirations rooted in our vision, mission and values, and defining concrete ways of measuring our Results. By promoting a positive and forward-thinking mindset, this framework is specifically designed to increase engagement and commitment at multiple levels of our complex stakeholder organization.
Our selection of SOAR was driven by ORCID’s specific strategic context. Planning approaches worked best when aligned with an organization’s current trajectory, performance, and external environment. Given that ORCID’s core vision and mission remain highly valid—and thus a strategic change of direction is not warranted—the SOAR method’s emphasis on doing more of what is working for the organization while expanding our horizons perfectly suits our needs. Furthermore, as the research and scholarly landscape faces challenging and uncertain times, SOAR allows us to remain agile and adapt quickly by continually reinforcing and leveraging our core competencies.
Through the course of 2025, we sought input broadly from our community — holding SOAR workshops with our Board, our team, our members (via our Consortia Lead organizations) and researchers through the ORCID Researcher Advisory Council. Ultimately, we believe this positive, inclusive methodology has created a strategic plan that is fundamentally aligned with ORCID’s enduring values and vision, and that will guide us through the next four years as we continue to advance our mission.
We invite you to review our new strategic plan and register for our 2026 Town Hall webinar on 25 March!
