Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier Faring Well In India

The Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier, aka ORCID, was launched mid-October 2012 as a not-for-profit initiative for delivering a universal author ID service to the world research and scholarly community. Author name identification and dissambiguation has been a pending issue in the research communication domain for a long time and all efforts so far -as provided by institutions, open access repositories or databases, commercial providers or even national author ID initiatives- have proved insufficiently wide in their coverage to be successful.

ORCID could well be a different story: at the end of 2012, barely two months after its launch, over 40,000 authors have registered with the service and do now have their own ID – plus a growing list of their own publications automatically attached to (and updated in) their author profile thanks to the interoperability features provided by ORCID (see Sridhar Gutam’s own ORCID page as an example). The fact that all stakeholders involved in research communication, from researchers and institutions to publishers through funders and commercial enterprises are part of the ORCID Team represents a guarantee for an ever-increasing collection of integration features that will consolidate in 2013...