CrossRef is pleased to announce that it will be participating in the recently launched Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative to create an unambiguous identifier for scholarly and professional researchers.

Our members will be aware that CrossRef has been exploring the possibility of creating an “author DOI” or “contributor ID”  system. In doing so, it has become clear that the issues and use-cases involved in identifying researchers span a broad collection of stakeholders including libraries, institutions, funders, publishers and, of course researchers themselves. In short, this is not primarily “a publisher problem.” As such, we believe that the ORCID approach to creating an inclusive and open organization representing all the stakeholders in the scholarly communications process represents the best chance of creating a successful contributor identification system

For ten years the CrossRef DOI has allowed researchers, librarians and publishers to unambiguously identify published scholarly literature. We believe that the next step toward creating a robust and persistent scholarly record is to develop a similar mechanism for unambiguously crediting researchers for their scholarly contributions. We look forward to working with the ORCID members to make this happen.

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