Two not-for profit organisations, ORCID and CrossRef, have collaborated to solve the problem of ambiguous author names in scholarly content. ORCID began assigning unique identifiers to researchers in October. As part of the ORCID Registry, individuals can search the metadata from CrossRef and add their works to their personal ORCID records. CrossRef claims to be the largest organisation assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to scholarly content.
Connecting researchers with their research has been hampered by lack of data standards, and in particular a standard for identifying individuals. ORCID provides researchers a Registry to create a unique personal identifier, and has been working with the research community to embed these identifiers in research workflows.
One key component of the ORCID interface is the ability to import metadata on research works to populate an individual's ORCID record. As an affiliate member of CrossRef, ORCID provides its users the ability to search and import bibliographic metadata from CrossRef.
In addition to importing past works, ORCID is working with CrossRef and the publishing community to ensure that ORCID identifiers collected during the manuscript submission process are incorporated into article metadata and included with the information submitted to CrossRef. At the launch of the ORCID Registry, a number of publishers and manuscript tracking system vendors integrated ORCID identifiers into their author profile and submission processes.
In order to access the CrossRef bibliographic metadata, ORCID has become an affiliate of CrossRef. Likewise CrossRef is a founding member of ORCID. CrossRef has modified its metadata schema so that publishers can include ORCID iDs with their bibliographic metadata deposits. The CrossRef system will allow querying for ORCIDs from its records early in 2013.
