Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems imbedded in the scholarly research ecosystem. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard. Our goal is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organizations, from governments to universities.

Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group convened the first Name Identifier Summit in Cambridge, MA on Monday, November 2009, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity. The ORCID Initiative is moving ahead with broad stakeholder participation (view participant gallery). As the Initiative develops, we plan to engage researchers and other community members directly via social media and other campaigns.  Participation from all stakeholders at all levels is essential to fulfilling the Initiative’s mission.

Technical Contributions

Several organizations have agreed to contribute data sources and technologies to aid the initial development of the ORCID prototype, including: Researcher ID profile system from Thomson Reuters, author profiles from REPEC, Scholars Universe, Scopus, and bibliographic data from the CrossRef metadata database. In parallel, ORCID will be investigating and analyzing other contributor identification schemes and systems to determine how they can interoperate with this system.