(7 April 2015) ORCID has been awarded an 18-month, $3 million grant by The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to develop the infrastructure and capacity to support international adoption and technical integration of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor) identifiers, through staff expansion, regional workshops and localized member technical support.
ORCID is a nonprofit organization that aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications. Name ambiguity poses a significant challenge for the research enterprise because researchers are unable to locate information or data they need to conduct their own work, wasting countless hours and resources in the process. To this end, ORCID maintains an open Registry, where researchers may obtain a unique, persistent identifier to use across their research “transactions,” such as grant applications, manuscripts and thesis submissions, and shared datasets. ORCID works with the community to ensure that the ORCID identifier is collected, stored and embedded in key documents like grants, publications and datasets so that researchers’ contributions can be easily found, cited and used, thus improving the efficiency and transparency in scholarly studies.
As the research community grows, becomes more international, and increasingly uses digital means to communicate, the use of authors’ names are not enough. Different people share names, there are issues with transliteration between languages, some people change names and even people with fairly uncommon names may have published using name variations such as first initials, last name or full first and last name. Over 1.2 million researchers have registered for an ORCID identifier since the registry launched in October 2012.
The announcement and overview of the project is here.
