ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a not-for-profit organization that works to create a world where all who participate in research, scholarship and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations. ORCID is funded through organizational membership and subscriptions.

ORCID is the international standard, with more than 1,000 member organizations worldwide, including USask and most Canadian universities.

In order to make your work and research activities distinguishable from that of other academics, ORCID builds connections through digital identifiers. Your ORCID identifier (ORCID ID) allows you to maintain an ongoing link between you and your professional activities throughout your career.

The ORCID ID is a unique 16-digit number for you to associate with your name as you engage in research scholarship and innovation activities. ORCID IDs have been issued to researchers since 2012.

By using your identifier in research workflows like manuscript and grant submission, you can connect yourself with your professional activities and affiliations. After signing in to ORCID, you can grant permission for the systems and platforms you use to update your ORCID record with trusted information about you. This enables easy and error-free sharing and re-use of this information.

A number of journal publishers now require authors to provide their ORCID ID.  The identifier distinguishes between researchers with similar names and brings work published under different name variants together (for example, works associated with your full first name and works using your first initial; works published before and after a name change).

No information about a person is encoded in the ORCID ID. The identifiers are designed to be usable in situations where personally-identifiable information should not or cannot be shared. Also, since the ORCID ID is intended to be a career-long identifier, no information that can change over a person's career (such as country, institution, or field of study) is embedded in the ID.

The University Library encourages all academics with a research profile to set up their own ORCID ID to make their scholarly work easier to access and aggregate.

It takes less than a minute to set up your identifier.  Register for your ID and link it to your USask NSID now! More information on how to get started can be found on ORCID’s support page.

• Register for your ORCID ID

As a contributing member of the USask research community, there are many benefits to using an ORCID ID.

ORCID is a career-long identifier

Your ORCID ID is associated with you throughout your career.

ORCID is the standard

Globally, the identifier is commonly required and utilized by funders, publishers (submission of work for peer review, or for reviewers), repositories, and professional organizations.

Increases visibility of your research outputs and your institution

Through the search function on ORCID’s website, your work is easier to discover by potential collaborators, funders and employers. ORCID IDs are indexed by Google Scholar and can be linked to key databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science.

You manage your privacy

ORCID allows you to control what information is public, private, or shared with trusted parties.

Eliminates name ambiguity

An ORCID ID provides you with a unique professional identity, which allows for a more accurate and complete listing of your scholarly output.

Enhances USask's profile

By stating your affiliation to the university, your use of your ORCID ID increases the university’s ability to acknowledge, credit and showcase USask-affiliated research, enhancing the university’s international profile and reputation. When an ORCID profile is integrated with other applications and systems (Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science), an ORCID ID acts as a hub, providing a more comprehensive picture of research output.

Enhances credit attribution

ORCID ensures that you are more consistently and accurately credited for your work.

Links to other scholarly activity

Your ORCID ID allows you to highlight other scholarly activity and non-traditional research outputs such as digital creations, datasets, supervised student publications, patents, and newspaper or media articles.

UnivRS integration

Information stored in ORCID can be imported into UnivRS to make it easier for faculty to update their USask Standardized CV, Forms 1 and Forms 2.

• See the profile of Josiah Carberry

What is ORCID? from ORCID on Vimeo.

Questions about ORCID?

Contact your subject librarian for more information about using ORCID.