Persistent, unique identifiers for authors – ORCID and smaller publishers

Abstract

On October 15th the ORCID initiative (http://orcid.org) launched its long-awaited central registry service for scholarly authors and contributors. The new service enables researchers to obtain a unique, persistent personal identifier and to maintain a centralized record of their published works, grants and other scholarly activities. At the time of writing, over 30,000 users have signed on with the service in the first two months and several 3rd party online services are already linked to it, with many more to come in the next year. In this article I briefly outline the background to this important initiative and the identification problems it was created to solve, and conclude with remarks on what all this means for small, independent journal operations like ScieCom.