ORCID’s mission is to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.
We do this by providing three important things:
- The ORCID iD: a unique, persistent identifier free of charge to researchers
- An ORCID record connected to the ORCID iD, and
- A set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), as well as the services and support of communities of practice that enable interoperability between an ORCID record and member organizations so researchers can choose to allow connection of their iD with their affiliations and contributions
ORCID is a global, not-for-profit organization sustained by fees from our member organizations. We are community-built and governed by a Board of Directors representative of our membership with wide stakeholder representation. ORCID is supported by a dedicated and knowledgeable professional staff. Find out more.
Our Values
ORCID is an integral part of the wider digital infrastructure needed for researchers to share information on a global scale. Our work is open, transparent, and non-proprietary. We are guided by the principles of privacy and researcher control and the vision of identifier-enabled research information infrastructure. We make decisions collaboratively, involving our staff, Board, those who support our mission, and the researchers and community that are the purpose of our work.
ORCID’s Vision…is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time
We take a global view. We have a diverse team, deployed internationally in our “virtual office.” We engage with a wide range of organizations and people to ensure broad viewpoints. We strive to be a trusted component of research infrastructure with the goal of providing clarity in the breadth of research contributions and the people who make them.
How We Do It
 | RESEARCHER Position the researcher at the center of all that we do |  | INFRASTRUCTURE Invest in developing a robust information infrastructure |
 | TRUSTED ASSERTIONS Enable a wide range of verified iD-ID connections |  | STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIPS Develop sustainability through strategic relationships |
Our Principles
- ORCID will work to support the creation of a permanent, clear, and unambiguous record of research and scholarly communication by enabling reliable attribution of authors and contributors.
- ORCID will transcend discipline, geographic, national, and institutional boundaries.
- Participation in ORCID is open to any organization that has an interest in research and scholarly communications.
- Access to ORCID services will be based on transparent and non-discriminatory terms posted on the ORCID website.
- Researchers will be able to create, edit, and maintain an ORCID identifier and record free of charge.
- Researchers will control the defined privacy settings of their own ORCID record data.
- All data contributed to ORCID by researchers or claimed by them will be available in standard formats for free download (subject to the researchers’ own privacy settings) that are updated once a year and released under a CC0 waiver.
- All software developed by ORCID will be publicly released under an Open Source Software license approved by the Open Source Initiative. For the software it adopts, ORCID will prefer Open Source.
- ORCID identifiers and record data (subject to privacy settings) will be made available via a combination of no-charge and for-a-fee APIs and services. Any fees will be set to ensure the sustainability of ORCID as a not-for-profit, charitable organization focused on the long-term persistence of the ORCID system.
- ORCID will be governed by representatives from a broad cross-section of stakeholders, the majority of whom are not-for-profit, and will strive for maximal transparency by publicly posting summaries of all Board meetings and annual financial reports.