Chances are you have seen the green ORCID iD icon next to someone’s name on a digital publication, in a data repository, or in an email signature. You may have even been asked to create one to submit a manuscript or apply for funding. But what is ORCID and what benefits does it offer? And why is it important to ensure you have one now?
About ORCID
ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a non-profit organization supported by participating research organizations, publishers, funders, and professional associations from around the globe. Their mission is to uniquely identify all those participating in research and scholarship and connect them with their contributions via the free 16-digit ORCID iD and the associated record (also called a profile). Over the past decade, ORCID has become a professional asset for scholars in every discipline and a universally trusted and integral part of the research life cycle and the various systems that support it.
Anyone who is doing research, publishing, applying for grants, peer reviewing journal articles, teaching, presenting, or producing creative works, or who plans to undertake any of these activities should register for an ORCID iD. It remains persistent throughout your career, no matter how your name or affiliation may change, allowing you to distinguish yourself from other researchers and manage links to all your scholarly contributions. Your ORCID record has sections for many types of information, including biographical, employment, education/qualifications, professional activities, funding, works (i.e., your research outputs), and peer reviews. You control how this information is shared with the public.
Benefits for Temple Scholars
By registering for an ORCID iD, you will join approximately 5,000 Temple scholars in the ORCID registry. It is free to register for one, and, because Temple University Libraries has been an institutional member of ORCID since 2017, you can easily do this by using your Temple AccessNet credentials.
For Peter Marshall, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple, “The value of ORCID is keeping a reliable and accurate record of my research contributions that is not tied to specific companies or institutions. I also appreciate its utility in showcasing peer review activities.”
A National Institutes of Health (NIH) program officer encouraged Marshall’s departmental colleague, David Smith, Associate Professor and Director of the Neuroeconomics Laboratory, to create an ORCID iD many years ago. He said, “It’s great to have one because it tracks much of my scholarly activity, including things like grants and service-related activities. In addition, ORCID is also beginning to serve as a single sign-on (SSO), making it much easier to access various websites and systems that I use with regularity.”
Publisher and Funder Requirements
Since 2016, major publishers have committed to requiring ORCID iDs in the publishing process for their journals, including Springer Nature and PLOS. Publishers use ORCID to clearly link authors and reviewers with their research by embedding ORCID iDs into their publication metadata and displaying them on finished publications.
By May 2025, most federal funding agencies, such as the NIH, will require ORCID iDs on proposal submission documents and progress reports. ORCID is currently the only persistent identifier (PID) option that meets the new requirements stipulated in the recent White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) memo and National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 (NSPM-33) guidance on making federally funded research freely available.
Maria Palazuelos Jorganes, Associate Vice President of Research Compliance, encourages and supports Temple researchers to register for an ORCID iD and create their own record due to the iD’s persistence and reliability. It will allow accurate identification of individual investigators, streamline data entry in research systems, and attribute scholarly work and affiliations. As Palazuelos Jorganes points out, “Being able to account and track research contributions is required by most federal agencies, facilitates data sharing and transparency, enables mandated research security reviews, and ensures investigators and institutions can validate integrity of research data and reporting.”
Palazuelos Jorganes stresses the importance of ORCID’s integration with other applications so that researchers can easily use the information in their ORCID records to populate biographical and disclosure forms during federal funding application processes. She also acknowledges that “The most notable integration is SciENcv, the new format for biosketch already [being] required for all National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and very soon for all NIH grants as well (effective May 25th, 2025). Another is Pivot, a searchable database for funding which matches funding available for researchers with keywords found in their ORCID profile.”
Researchers can learn more about ORCID and its integration with SciENcv at the Office of the Vice President for Research’s upcoming webinar on March 20th at 3pm.
Additional Information
ORCID is also integrated with other Temple applications, including:
- TUScholarShare (Temple’s institutional repository)
- Open journal systems (OJS)
- Dryad
- ProQuest’s ETD Administrator (theses/dissertations)
For more information about how to create and maintain an ORCID record and the ways it can help support your research activities and career, visit Temple University Libraries’ ORCID guide. For questions, contact Alicia Pucci at alicia.pucci@temple.edu or your subject librarian or specialist.
