ORCID established its Trust Program in 2016, and this blog post celebrates its fifth anniversary. The ORCID organization, of which UMass Amherst is a member, has a mission “of enabling transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations” and “a vision of a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.” These aspirations are made real on the basis of trust built on individual researcher control, accountability and strict organization provenance tracking. Researchers/scholars/contributors control who can write to, read from and edit the data associated with their ORCID profile, for how long they can do it, with verification of the source organizations.
With ORCID’s growth have come attempts to misuse the connections and tools it provides. These include automated search engine optimization and spam generators that could potentially undermine trust. ORCID has put in place brakes that halt these schemes. Another less common problem is academic fraud by which people misrepresent their works and affiliations. This is a violation of the terms of use and these records can be challenged through the dispute procedures. ORCID is not an arbiter of what data is associated with a contributor profile, but it does provide authenticated workflows with registered data providers. A researcher can determine for themselves the authenticity of the data and the provenance of the data provider before deciding whether or not to grant permission for data exchange.
ORCID is a non-profit, member-governed organization that provides an open platform for disambiguated, unique and persistent researcher/scholar/contributor name identifier and profile information. And ORCID ID is a free service to individuals. More information about ORCID is available from this guide.
