Geoff Bilder
Interim Technical Director, ORCID
ORCID and CrossRef
Amy Brand
Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments
Harvard University
The name ambiguity problem in attribution of scholarship is one that can only be solved collaboratively, when all stakeholders agree on a standard identification scheme. The ORCID initiative was launched in 2010 to address this problem by bringing together universities, publishers, funding bodies, and other organizations in the scholarly communications space to create a global, open registry of unique, persistent identifiers for individual researchers, and a transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other author identifier schemes. ORCIDs linked to publications and other artifacts of scholarship promise to enhance the research discovery process, streamline management of grants and researcher profile data, and simplify mechanisms for output and impact tracking. This project briefing will cover recent ORCID developments, including the Phase 1 system launch scheduled for early 2012, the National Science Foundation EAGER award to fund research at the University of Chicago and Harvard University to examine ORCID’s role in advancing the science of science policy, and ORCID’s planned membership and sustainability models.