ORCID is an open, not-for-profit organization. Founded by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from Oct. 2012, ORCID provides a persistent identifier (ORCID) for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) uses a 16-character identify, using the digits 0–9, and separated into groups of four by hyphens for a researcher’s ID, for example, 0000-0003-3589-9987. And the ORCID ID is specified as an URI, for example, http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3589-9987, an online profile in recording latest information of a research or contributor.

As of 22 July 2016, the number of registered live ORCID ids reported by ORCID was 2,414,577. The organizational members include many research institutions such as British Library, Cornell University, NTU, NTNU and NCCU. Academic publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Nature Publishing Group, commercial companies including Thomson Reuters, academic societies and funding bodies are also joined as members.

The short video “What is ORCID? ”: https://vimeo.com/97150912

For individuals

• The ORCID provides a unique identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research activities. The ORCID can solve the problem such as different peoples with the same name.
• Currently many publishers, such as Nature, Elsevier, PLOS, Springer already used ORCID in their manuscriptweneral public (include faculty/staff family library card holders, library members, inter-library card holders, library volunteers, visitors) are not allowed to bring personal belongings (books, backpacks, etc.) excluding laptops into the library.
• The bibliographical databases such as Web of Science and Scopus now adopt the ORCID as a kind of identifier of the authors. Using the unique ids, the databases can provide author bibliographic information more precisely.
• Every ORCID is linked to an online profile where authors can update their latest contact details, e.g. http://orcid.org/(ORCID ID). Using ORCID online profile makes the researcher’s information more visible.
• The ORCID provides each researcher with an updated ‘digital curriculum vitae’ and with ORCID the research can complete their publication lists more easily by linking the bibliographic databases.

For organizations

• ORCID organizational member can use the open-access ORCID database to build their own institutional services such as human resource system and academic service system. ORCID can reduce the time-consuming process of maintaining up-to-date records.
• Using ORCID records, research organization can build the institutional “Scholar Hub” or “Academic Hub” to demonstrate and facilitates the researches and scholarly activities.

NCKU has become an ORCID organizational member form Feb. 2016. We (the NCKU library) invite you to register for an ORCID id and permit NCKU for further use, including maintaining your publication lists, integrating ORCID records to institutional repository system and building the school academic hub and so on. If you already had an ORCID id, please also permit NCKU for further use. Click the “Create or connect your ORCID” button icon below, thank you.