ORCID’s First Decade:10

From Startup to Sustainability

Table of Contents
Foreword ................................................................................................................................... 4
An Overview of ORCID’s First Decade .................................................................................... 6
Before ORCID: The Origins of Persistent Identification ...................................................... 7
A New Name Identifier Emerges ........................................................................................... 8
Gathering Funding ................................................................................................................. 10
A Broad Coalition of Support ................................................................................................. 11
Making it Happen: ORCID’s Early Days ................................................................................. 13
Entering the Ecosystem ......................................................................................................... 15
Committed to Researcher Control ........................................................................................ 18
An ‘Angel’ Steps in; ORCID Staff Expands ............................................................................. 19
The Consortium: ORCID at Scale .......................................................................................... 20
The Trust Program .................................................................................................................. 24
Community-Driven, Strategic Governance ......................................................................... 25
Looking Forward .................................................................................................................... 27

3

Foreword

Chris Shillum
Executive
Director

Linda O’Brien
Board Chair

4

With ORCID’s 10th anniversary still on the horizon a couple of years ago, the
ORCID Board started to discuss the importance of documenting ORCID’s
history—something that would help tell the story of a community coming
together to create the sustainable, open-research infrastructure service thathas now become essential for so many stakeholders around the world. Aspart of ORCID’s focus on good governance, Board members are limited to a
maximum of two three-year terms. The last of the founding Directors left theBoard in 2020, and nearly all of the original staff members have moved on to
pastures new (several to our fellow scholarly infrastructure organizations).
We wanted to capture ORCID’s “origin story” whilst the people involved werestill around to tell the tale. Getting ORCID off the ground was no small feat;anyone can have a vision for starting a new service, but it takes a special kindof collaboration, determination, and sense of purpose to turn that vision intoa sustainable operation that has outlived all of its founders. In ORCID’s case,
we take the “P” in Persistent IDs seriously, and are committed to providing
unique identifiers to researchers and contributors in perpetuity. That’s quite
an undertaking.
Earlier this year, we commissioned John Lehmann-Haupt, a writer familiar
with the PID universe and with many years of experience in corporate
communications in scholarly publishing, to interview many of the key people
involved in the startup of ORCID and to capture their experience in a narrative
form. The result, ORCID’s First Decade: From Startup to Sustainability, aims to tell
the story from the point of view of those involved.

Rather than trying to create a full accounting of every detail involved in thecreation of an organization as complex and broadly based as ORCID, we instead
decided to focus on celebrating the individuals and organizations who got
ORCID off the ground and then worked toward organizational sustainability.
As well as the interviews, conducted with numerous board members, alumni,
and key players from across our stakeholder community who were involved in
the founding, John trawled through ORCID’s archives and accessed our libraryof previous blog posts. Our hope is that anyone interested in following in our
founders’ footsteps and creating a community-led infrastructure organization
will be able to use this document as a case study on one way to navigate thejourney from idea to scalability and sustainability, and gain greater insight intosome of the challenges and pitfalls ORCID encountered along the way.
ORCID has experienced explosive growth in a short decade. Perhaps mostnotably, ORCID ended its first year in operation in 2012 with over 40,000
records, and now, in 2022, we host 15 million. We are extremely proud of theway that ORCID has grown and recognize that it has done so because of astrong and broad base of supporters from all sectors involved in scholarly
communication. As we pause and reflect on the incredible feat of vision,organizing, and funding from a dedicated group responsible for ORCID’s early
success, we are also excited about the next chapter, how ORCID plans to build
value for our members and users in the future. The strong foundation createdby their work enables us to contemplate ambitious plans for the next decade.
We hope you will join us for the next phase of growth.

5An Overview of ORCID’s First Decade

mid

1990s

research journals
start moving
online1997

DOI
intruduced

2007
contributor
identifier
discussions
began

2010
ORCID
incorporated

October

2012

ORCID

registry launched

6

As the dissemination of research journals
began to move online in the mid-1990s,
it became clear that to fulfill the promiseof a robust, inclusive web of scholarly
communications, there needed to be twothings: a unique, persistent-identifier systemfor published works, and another such system
for the people creating those works. With thattwin foundation in place, discoverability andcredit attribution would improve dramatically,
opening new channels for collaboration andfor tracking and assessing the impact ofpublished research.
With the strong interest of scholarly
publishers in establishing an industry-widesystem of reference-citation linking for theirjournals, the initial focus was on a works
identifier, resulting in the introduction of theDigital Object Identifier (DOI) in 1997 and its
implementation by Crossref, a collaborative
publisher organization launched in 2000. The
Crossref linking service was soon adopted
by all the major publishers, and attention
turned to the creation of an identifier for
authors and other research contributors. In
2007, discussions of a contributor identifiersystem began at Crossref, which for a time wasconsidered a possible host for such a service.
But by 2009, the momentum had shifted toan effort guided by key figures at Thomson
Reuters and Nature Publishing Group (asthey were then known), who marshaled ateam of volunteers from across the researchcommunity in recognition of the broad baseof stakeholders who would benefit by thiscapability. Through their work, the nonprofit
Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifier(ORCID) was incorporated in August 2010, and,with the financial support of startup loans fromthe publishing community and grants andsponsorships from several organizations, the
ORCID service was launched in October 2012.

ORCID Launch, October 2012

The initial uptake of the service 		
substantially exceeded expectations. Fromthe start, ORCID was intended to serve thebroadest possible range of stakeholders,spanning researchers, libraries, research
institutions, funding agencies, intermediaries,
and publishers, with particular emphasis on
the needs of researchers. Accordingly, its
operation has been guided at every level by aset of founding principles that stress
openness, trust, and inclusivity, with nocharge access for researchers, who maintainfull control of their data. Developing andrefining a consortium-based business modelthat has allowed it to tap member resources
for implementation and support, ORCID has
gained a global presence while remaininga small, nimble entity. Attaining financial
sustainability in 2019, ORCID has entered its
second decade deeply interwoven with thefabric of the global research enterprise.

Before ORCID: The Origins

of Persistent Identification
1964

citation index
created by
Eugene Garfield

1997

ThomsonCorporation
introduced online
Web of Science

2008
Release of
ResearcherID

The registry of disambiguated names at
the heart of ORCID can be traced back to
the citation index created in 1964 by Eugene
Garfield, who had founded the Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI) in 1960. In 1992, The
Thomson Corporation acquired ISI, where thecitation index database became the basis of its
online Web of Science, introduced in 1997.

We had hundreds of thousands ofauthors who were indexed alongwith their papers and the citationsof those papers.
Dave Kochalko, ORCID CofounderDavid Kochalko had come to Thomson in late
1992: “We came up with the idea that weneeded an internal identifier to use in oursystem that would enable us to deduplicate
and validate authors.” The resulting
ResearcherID was released in January 2008,
allowing authors to self-identify and bevalidated accordingly.

Kochalko, “and there was reluctance on
the part of individuals to have their identity
depend upon a commercial entity. We started
talking internally about how we could takewhat was clearly a valuable innovation andopen it up.”At this point, Nature Publishing Group had
a strong working relationship with Thomson
Reuters, and with Web of Science in particular,
and early in 2008, Kochalko met with Howard
Ratner from Nature to explore what theymight collaborate on; Nature’s Timo Hannay
and Thomson Reuters’s Renny Guida werealso in attendance. “One of the ideas was tocreate what we at the time were calling Open
Researcher ID, using the technology thatThomson Reuters had already developed,”
said Ratner. With the central component inplace, it was a compelling possibility, and thegroup launched a project to develop it on April
28, 2009, holding follow-up meetings in June
and July.
During this time, Crossref had been
discussing its own proposed initiative,
known as Crossref Contributor ID andbased on a proof of concept developed bythen-Director of Strategic Initiatives Geoffrey
Bilder. But the Crossref people were not yetaware of the Thomson Reuters–Nature effort.

ResearcherID was very successful within thedomain of Thomson Reuters (as the company
was by then known), but there was an obstacle
to its expansion into the broader community.
“We were a private corporate entity,” said

7

A New Name Identifier Emerges

Understanding that they had reached thepoint where they needed to seek and gauge
stakeholder support, Ratner and Kochalko
planned an open meeting, the Name Identifier
Summit, scheduling it for 9 November, 2009,
in Boston to coincide with Crossref’s annual
meeting, thereby facilitating attendance byinterested parties from that community.

9 Nov

2009

Name Identifier
Summit“We understood that we didn’t know
everybody who was going to be in the nameidentifier space,” said Ratner, “so we ran up
the flag to see whom it would attract.” The
Summit drew attendees from 21 organizations
representing the publishing, library, scholarly
society, technology, research, and funding
sectors. It also marked the debut of the ORCID
name, with “and Contributor” added to Open
Researcher ID to reflect the appreciation
Kochalko and Ratner had gained fromstakeholders for the role of contributors,
who provide important material to research
projects but have not traditionally received
formal recognition.
The Summit was enthusiastically received,
and a stakeholder meeting followed on 2
December at Olympia Exposition Hall in
London, UK, keyed to the London Online and
STM Innovations meetings. Attendance at thissecond gathering was substantially greater,
again reflecting a broad stakeholder spectrum.

8

By this point, the necessity for ORCID asa separate entity had become clear. “TheCrossref community understood they wereprimarily a publisher forum, and that ORCID,
while it had a role to play with publishers,
had a much bigger role to play outside of
publishing,” said Ratner.
In the meantime, Kochalko had been working
in the background to shore up support for theventure at Thomson Reuters. “A fair amount of
capital had been invested in ResearcherID, andI spent many months negotiating internally,
explaining our concept and why it would bea benefit not only for the broader researchcommunity but also for our own business,”said Kochalko. The success of his efforts wasborne out by the support Thomson Reutersprovided in the ensuing months.
From December 2009 to February 2010,
Kochalko and Ratner, now the designatedco-chairs of the project, built the preliminary
framework for the new organization with thehelp of the Business/Policy Working Group,
headed by Craig Van Dyck of Wiley andBernie Rous of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM); the Technical Working
Group, under Ratner; and the Communications
Working Group, under Kochalko. The
ORCID.org website was created.

10 Feb2010

The next milestone was the 10 February,
2010, Participant’s Meeting, a virtual sessionthat drew 30 new individuals in addition toattendees of the two earlier meetings.

First Participant’s
Meeting

On 5 August, 2010, ORCID wasincorporated in the US state of
Delaware, governed by a 14-member

We all decided we wanted to build
an alpha version of the system.

Board of Directors, drawn from theinitial stakeholder organizations.

Howard Ratner, ORCID Cofounder

April 30

2010

Participant’s
Meeting at
Thomson Reuters
Boston officeThomson Reuters recommended that theparticipants enter into a memorandum of
understanding, providing the services ofAssistant General Counsel Michelle Lin pro
bono to help them navigate the process.
A second Participant’s Meeting, on 30 April,
was held at Thomson Reuters’s Boston office.
“Thomson Reuters donated critical resources,”
said Ratner, “including the services of Brian
Wilson, who did an enormous amount oftechnical work as head of the group thatdelivered the alpha prototype on 10 June.”

August2010
ORCID wasincorporated

Following a participant update on 17
September, 2010, the first in-person meetingof the Board was held at the New York office of
Nature Publishing Group, on 8 October.
“We had now migrated from a loose group toa structured entity complete with bylaws anda certificate of incorporation,” said Ratner,
who was elected Chair of the Board at the
8 October meeting. Kochalko was elected
Treasurer, and Amy Brand, who had recently
moved from Crossref to Harvard University’s
Office of Scholarly Communication, waselected Secretary. Liz Allen of Wellcome
Trust, Craig Van Dyck, and Bernie Rous were
elected to the Executive Committee, andMartin Fenner, a physician in Hannover,Germany, with expertise in software design,
was appointed Chair of the Outreach Working
Group. Additionally, Crossref donated Geoffrey
Bilder’s services as Interim Technical Director.

9Gathering Funding

44

initial sponsors$245K

The earliest funding for ORCID came in theform of sponsorships, a total of $245,000
from 44 organizations of various types,
supplemented in February 2011 by a $45,000
grant from the Mellon Foundation.

The Plan was to raise loans as we
had for Crossref, and it was very
successful.
Ed Pentz, founding Board member

2011
MellonFoundation

$45K

2013

Publisher Loans

$2.1M

10

“The grant allowed us to hire consultant
Raym Crow [of Chain Bridge Group] to workwith the Board on putting the plan together
and generating a final report.” said MacKenzie
Smith, a founding Board member who at thetime was Research Director for MIT Libraries
and served as Principal Investigator for the
Mellon grant. The report provided cost andrevenue models for the 10 years beginningin 2012, noting that ORCID had alreadyprogressed further than earlier name identifiersystems that had emerged within various
communities, because of its engagement withall the stakeholders necessary to success.

The bulk of startup funding, however, camein the form of loans from the publishingcommunity. “Howard Ratner and I went to
the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2011 andmet with all the big publishers after the STM
conference,” said Ed Pentz, Executive Directorof Crossref, a founding member of the ORCID
Board and its second Chair from 2014 to 2017.
“The plan was to raise loans as we had for
Crossref, and it was very successful. It was
clear that having publishers include ORCID intheir workflows and manuscript submission
systems would be crucial for its uptake, so
their support was critical. But it was always
clear there needed to be a broader group of
stakeholders involved, and that once things
got going there would be a sort of second
phase, with the focus on universities, libraries,
and funders, and with researchers at thecenter of things.”
The publisher loans, a total of $2.1 million,
were delivered in three rounds, the final
arriving in 2013.

A Broad Coalition of Support

ORCID’s 10 Founding Principles were codified
at the Board meeting of 18-19 November, 2010,
hosted in the UK by Wellcome Trust, a global
philanthropic foundation that provided earlysupport to the organization.

November

2010
ORCID’s 10
Founding
Principles

Very early on, we spent an enormous
amount of effort talking about whatbecame the ORCID Principles.
Simeon Warner, founding Board member

Simeon Warner was then Director of Library
Linked Data and Repository Architecture
Cornell University. “The foundation of
openness we established is very important.
And then we spent a lot of time working out
how to implement a system that stood up tothese principles and yet still delivered on thepromise, because there’s an inherent tension
between privacy and identification.”, he said.
“For example, birth years are often used tohelp distinguish book authors, but this kindof personal information isn’t usually sharedwithin the research community or associatedwith scholarly articles. So, while asking fora birth year as part of an ORCID record
might have helped with disambiguation
or reconciliation tasks, we favored 		
researcher privacy.”

ORCID’s principles around openness canalso be seen as balancing the concerns ofcommercial and noncommercial stakeholders.
“The vision that some of us had early on wasthat, through this identifier for researchers,
we would create a kind of open metadata
commons, with comprehensive data on the
outputs associated with individuals,” said
founding Board member Amy Brand, now
Director and Publisher, The MIT Press. “But theprevailing view was that all we actually neededfor disambiguation was partial data, and that
if we created a robust data set and put it out inthe open, we could be seen as competing withcommercial entities that sell services basedon such data.” The researcher-driven modelthat ORCID arrived at provided a data set thatleft room for supplementation and editorial
enhancement, affording other organizations(both commercial and nonprofit) ample
opportunity to create additional services.
Although Ratner and Kochalko’s plan for
ORCID incorporated the Thomson Reuters
ResearcherID system, that choice was notin fact set in stone, and there were early
discussions of possible alternatives, notably
ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier),at the time a draft ISO standard. But factors
emerged that eliminated it from contention
as a viable option.

11

April2012

ORCID EU
(now disscolved)“ISNI was based on the combination of rights
workflow and library authority use cases,
with the scope of people who could have an
ISNI those who had contributed to a creative
work such as a book, recording, or movie,”
said founding Board member Chris Shillumof Elsevier, who in October 2020 became
ORCID’s second Executive Director, having
left Elsevier the prior year. “For historicalreasons, people who have published only inthe journal literature are not included in libraryauthority files and are thus out of the scopeof ISNI, which would have been incompatible
with ORCID’s primary use case of scholarly
attribution.” Additionally, ISNI’s practice of ID
assignment by registration agency conflictedwith ORCID’s assertion that researchers would
control their own records, and its fee-per-ID
model was counter to the founding principlethat the ID be free for researchers to obtainand use.
Ultimately, Thomson Reuters donated the
ResearcherID code to ORCID under a perpetual
license with royalty-free use, allowing ORCID
not only to develop it in accordance with
ORCID’s principles and use cases but also 		
to make it available to the public underopen-source standards. ORCID and ISNI later
signed an Memorandum of Understanding
agreeing to establish interoperability between
the two systems.

12

From the beginning, the ORCID Board 		was representative of the international
stakeholder community, including not only
members based in the US and the UK but also
Hideaki Takeda, of Japan’s National Institute ofInformatics (NII); Martin Fenner, of Hannover,Germany; and Salvatore Mele, of the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

In the interest of broadening as
early as possible the reach anddiversity (as well as the acceptanceand legitimacy) of ORCID, CERN lent
its name to the initiative.
Salvatore Mele, CERN

“With our Director General, Prof. Rolf Heuer,
providing a quote for one of the earliest
press releases: ‘At the dawn of a new age of
discoveries in physics, where experiments thatprobe the structure of the universe are carriedout by international teams of scientists that
number in the thousands, correct attributionof research contribution is of crucial
importance. I welcome this joint initiative of
stakeholders in scholarly communication towork together on these issues.’ We also helped
found ORCID EU [since dissolved] in April 2012,
which obtained grants that funded European
outreach and integration with other mostly
European initiatives.”

Making it Happen:

ORCID’s Early Days
On 20 April, 2012, Employee Number One
came on board—Founding Executive Director
Laure Haak. “Laure had been working in mygroup at Thomson Reuters as Chief Science
Officer,” said Kochalko. “I thought she would
be a good fit for the role and introduced her
to Howard [Ratner]. As it turned out, she wasa splendid fit.”

be an enabler—an asset, not a competitor.”
And as a nonprofit with a small budget, ORCID
would be better served by a leaner offering.
Collaboration among a mixed stakeholder
group such as the ORCID Board, representing
varied professional cultures, could itself bea challenge. “We had people from industry

April

2012

Laure HaakFounding
Executive Director

Laure Haak, Founding Executive Director, April 2012

One of the first challenges Haak faced was
the question of exactly what the ORCID
service would be—an identifier system, ora profile system. “There were very strongly
held opinions on this,” she said. “Are wejust providing an identifier, with information
connected to it that can be pulled into othersystems, or something bigger, allowing
individuals to present information as a CV,
in the manner of existing profile systems?”
As mentioned earlier, the question had
been explored during the formulation of theFounding Principles, but discussions now
moved to a more pragmatic level. “There
were decisions about the growth of theorganization, both technically and socially,that depended on this distinction,” continued
Haak. “I felt that, strategically, the narrower
our scope, the better. We didn’t want to be incompetition with any of our stakeholders, andwith the focus on the identifier, ORCID would

and academia working together, and they
have very different approaches,” Haak said.
“Industry people tend to be iterative, putting
together small packages and refining themalong the way, while academics want to have

Howard and Dave were the ones
who set the initial vision.
Laure and Laura were the ones who
figured out how to get it done.
Chris Shillum, Executive Director

13the whole product in a box, as perfect as
possible, before unveiling it. So while on the
one hand we were discussing what the scopeof the service would be, on the other hand
there was the question, when will we release
it to the world?”
October

2011

U.S. National
ScienceFoundation Grant

June

2012

Laura Paglione
Founding
Technology
Director

October

2012

ORCID Service
Launch14

But launching the ORCID system was an
undeniable priority. Fortunately, a grant fromthe US National Science Foundation (NSF)
that had been awarded in October 2011
via the University of Chicago provided thefunds to hire a technical team, and in June
Laura Paglione joined ORCID as Founding
Technology Director. (Paglione also brought
formidable strategic expertise, in 2016 taking
on the role of Director of Strategic Initiatives.)
Once on board, Paglione set the launch for 16
October, 2012, an ambitious target leaving her
just four months to prepare. Aside from thetechnical challenges, the organization was ina nascent state, with Crossref initially helping
to carry out financial administrative tasks, so
there were challenges on a number of levels.
“Although Geoffrey [Bilder] and his team haddone a lot of development work on the originalResearcherID code base, it wasn’t yet ready forlaunch,” said Paglione. “But we managed to
do it. And had it not been for the scaling issues
at our hosting provider, everything would’ve
been fine!”
At the time, the data center ORCID wasusing had recently switched to a new platform
with an undetected bug that prevented its
accommodating an unexpected load. “We 		
got way more traffic than expected the firstday,” Paglione said. “I was basically up allnight talking to them. But we got it fixed 		
the next day.”
Paglione quickly began to build a team,bringing on Cat (Catalina) Wilmers as
Customer Support Lead in the launchmonth and Rob Peters as Lead Developer in
December; Technical Support Specialist Liz
Krznarich came on later, in July 2014. Paglione
also changed the external development
provider from a UK-based firm to the
Colombia, South America-based Avantica, a“nearshore” option in the same time zone as
ORCID that was also more cost effective. “Thenwe brought on a couple of the Avantica people
in early 2013, so that all our development work
was done in house, making it much more
efficient to update the code,” said Paglione.

Paglione’s TeamHaak commented on the unexpected surgeof early registration for ORCID iDs. “There
were bets as to how many people would haveregistered by year’s end; the highest was
10,000. We had 5,000 registrants before theend of the week. And we had 50,000 by theend of the year.”Entering the Ecosystem

By design, ORCID was intended to be a trusted
source of information that would both disambiguate registrants and document aspects of
their professional achievements, dovetailingwith the systems and workflows of stakeholders—universities and scholarly societies
tracking the research output of their constituencies, funding agencies informing their grant
decisions and tracking their impact, publishers
enhancing their submission systems and theirability to locate potential peer reviewers, andresearchers themselves, ensuring attribution
and seeking collaborators while benefitingfrom the ease of managing and sharing theinformation in their ORCID records.
From this perspective, the strong earlyregistrations were encouraging—a testament
to the trust the organization had alreadyengendered—but by no means a guaranteeof success.
“What’s fascinating about ORCID is that thevalue of it depends on so many integrations,”
said Veronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer

at PLOS, a Board member (with a brief hiatus)
from 2013 to 2022 and serving as Chair from2017 to 19. “At the beginning, when you asked
researchers to sign up, you were really sellinga promise. The fact that in such a short time itwent from the promise of value to somethingthat is every year providing more value isremarkable.”
Haak and Paglione initiated an ongoing
campaign of programs very early on topromote such integrations, beginning with
the Launch Partners Program, through which
17 participating organizations helped test
ORCID’s APIs and developed use cases andworkflows in the run-up to the launch. As
noted in the 2012 ORCID Annual Report, “At
launch, researchers were able to register andobtain an ORCID, search for their publications
and import metadata, link to external IDs,and link to ORCID from manuscript tracking
systems…these integrations have been
responsible for upwards of a third of the traffic
to the ORCID Registry.” As of mid-2022, there
are more than 4,000 live ORCID integrations.

ORCID team at the ORCID–CASRAI meeting at the University of Barcelona, May 201515

A 2013 grant from the Alfred P. Sloanfoundation funded the influential Adoption
and Integration Program, through which nineorganizations chosen through a competitive
solicitation were awarded cash and publicity
for their integrations of ORCID into theirrepositories and personnel management
systems.

2013

ORCID’s Adoption
and Integration
Program“We understood that to encourageorganizations to join ORCID, it would bevery helpful if they could see it working
somewhere,” said Haak. “The idea of the
Adoption and Integration Program was foreach participating institution to get together
a group that crossed departments—library,research, office, IT—and pitch us a project. We
gave the winners grants in the $15,000 range
and a year of free ORCID membership, andshowcased their work prominently.”
Board member Simeon Warner spoke ofCornell University’s project, the integration of
ORCID with VIVO, a system used by institutions

Although the Adoption and Integration
Program was limited to US and Canadianparticipation, its impact was international.
“These early adopters really showed thepossibilities of ORCID, and made it possible forplaces in Europe, Australia, and New Zealandto say, ‘We can make that happen here, too,’”said Haak. “It was hugely important. The
project concept was reimplemented in the
UK and became the foundation of the UK
ORCID consortium.”

ORCID’s Adoption and Integration Program

A little further along, the Collect and Connect
program was another initiative that proved
useful in promoting integrations. “It was a
big program designed to increase both thecollection of ORCID iDs and the actual use of
the ORCID platform through integrations,” said
Paglione. “We provided branding that allowed
participating members to highlight theirachievements.” Launched in May 2016, theprogram encouraged funders, publishers, andresearch institutions to complete a four-stepprocess: collect validated ORCID iDs, ensuringthat their owners were correctly associatedwith their affiliations and contributions;

May

2016

ORCID’s Collectand Connect
Program16

to help curate staff profiles. “It had particular
adoption in the health sciences sphere,
where its ability to support very fine-grained
descriptions of work can help experts findcollaborators in their areas,” he said. “There
was a clear utility to doing an integration with
ORCID, because inside a VIVO installation, youwant to be able to pull in fresh publications
without anyone at the institution having toenter them. With ORCID iDs coming from
Crossref along with new publications, you 		
had a beautiful source of material for VIVO.”AUTHENTICATEDISPLAY

COLLECT

CONNECTSYNCHRONIZE

display the iDs, as a signal to researchersthat an information system was plumbed tosupport the use of ORCID; connect information
about affiliations and contributions to ORCID
records; and synchronize between systems
for faster and more accurate reporting, with areduced data entry burden for researchers andadministrators alike.
As Alice Meadows (then Director of Community
Engagement and Support) wrote in the ORCID
announcement of Collect and Connect, “Ourultimate goal is for individuals to register for
an ORCID iD and, simply by using it as you
work and make contributions, enabling yourinformation to be automatically connected to
all the other research and scholarship systems
you use.” In her June 2017 follow-up post,
Meadows reported that a significant number ofintegrations had been executed, with a groupof members awarded badges for completionof at least two of the four steps. She went on
to emphasize a critical point: “Underpinningeverything is authentication—requiring users
to log into their ORCID record to share their iD,
rather than keying in or pasting their ORCID iD
into a data field.”Paglione described a twofold challenge often
encountered in soliciting the adoption andintegration of ORCID: demonstrating its value
to organizations, and developing relationships
with the intermediaries that would actually
implement the integrations.

“The need for ORCID is obvious from thecommunity perspective, but if you dial it
back to what an individual company needs, it
wasn’t always immediately clear that ORCID
solved their problem,” she said. Publishers,
for example, didn’t always see the point ofcollecting and displaying an ORCID iD, when
the names and affiliations of a publishedpaper’s authors, perhaps with some contact
information for the corresponding author,
were generally included.
The potential of a disambiguated identifier
within the greater context of the ecosystem
was not obvious to all, and explaining how
authentication would fit into the workflow
was not always easy. She cited the integrationof ORCID with eXtyles, a widely used suiteof editorial and XML tools offered by INERA,
as exemplary of the three-party dynamic(put simply, this integration ensures thatauthenticated ORCID iDs are accurately
included in a manuscript’s final XML file).
“We worked to make it a partnership between
the publisher, the vendor, and us,” she said,“providing as much technical support as we
could to make it happen. eXtyles is widelyused, so having INERA incorporate ORCID
into their tools opened the door for a lot of
publishers to participate in ORCID.”
Outreach to communicate the value of ORCID
has been ongoing, with the development of a
new set of value stories delineated by ORCID’s
stakeholder groups in 2021, and offerings suchas the “I’m a Member, Now What?!” webinar
series launched in summer 2022.

17

Committed to Researcher Control

Although it was always a given that
researchers would have complete control overthe content of their ORCID records, there wasa major policy question early on as to whether
the organizations they were affiliated withwould be given the power to create ORCID
iDs on their behalf. Initially, it seemed that
granting this power would be a highly efficient
way to populate ORCID with registrations,but when the approach was implemented,
problems emerged.

to their researchers’ ORCID records, again
contingent on their permission.

“By way of example, MIT registered ORCID iDs
for all their researchers,” said Chris Shillum.
“What we found was that many of them didn’t
even know they had an ORCID iD, so that later,
perhaps when submitting a manuscript, theywould inadvertently create a second one,
resulting in duplication and defeating thewhole purpose.”“Some of the services that are a priority
for members might not be a priority for
researchers,” said Salvatore Mele. “If I’m a
researcher, I may have written a couple ofpapers I’m not very proud of, and I don’t
want them listed in my ORCID record. But
the consortium is interested in metrics, increating comprehensive lists of publications
by university, by year, for example.

Simeon Warner noted another issue. “There’s
also the danger of annoying the researchers,”
he said. “People tend not to like it when things
are created for them and put on the web
without their knowledge.”
By late 2015, ORCID had tested andimplemented an opt-in program known as
Create on Demand, through which researchers
were alerted by their institutions to theavailability of ORCID iDs and invited to create
them. “At a university, this usually comesin the form of a message from the provost,
greatly reducing the likelihood of researchers
dismissing it as spam or a phishing attempt,”
said Haak. Subsequently, this system wasenhanced by the Affiliation Manager, a simple
tool allowing institutions to add affiliation data

18

An interesting dynamic of ORCID is that while
researchers are its cornerstone, they do notcontribute to it financially; its revenue derives
from membership fees paid by member
organizations. And there can be a certain
tension between what researchers want andwhat their institutions want, marking an area
where the maintenance of trust is paramount.

“So, those who pay can be perceived by the
researchers as wanting to track them, measurethem, box them, in ways they don’t want. We
have been successful in avoiding this by giving
the researchers tools from very early on to add
only the information they choose.”An ‘Angel’ Steps in;

ORCID Staff Expands

2014

National Science
Foundation Grant
Cancelled

April

2015

Leona M. andHarry B. Helmsley
Charitable Trust

October

2016

Leona M. andHarry B. Helmsley
Charitable Trust

In its first couple of years of operation,
ORCID had made impressive progress interms of both the number of researcher
registrations and the range of member
adoptions and integrations. But its finances
remained precarious, a cause for concern.
The anticipation that the startup loans would
provide sufficient breathing space for theorganization to develop a sustainable businessmodel had not been met, with the expenses
involved in scaling it to be a global venture still
not covered by its revenue.
On top of this, in 2014, a grant that had been
initially approved by the National Science
Foundation to fund the implementation of
ORCID in the data management processes ofa group of major universities was canceledfollowing a financial audit. “We had put
together the whole program early in the year
and hired people based on the approval,”
said Haak. “A few months later, they reversed
themselves; we had to let one person go by
way of mitigation.
“And then some angel stepped in, to thisday I don’t know who, and I got a phone
call from the Helmsley Foundation asking
how they could help. I went to them with ashort proposal for promoting international
ORCID adoption and integration through staff
expansion, regional workshops, and localized
member technical support.
“They gave us $3 million.”

Ultimately, the grant from The Leona M. andHarry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust came intwo stages: the initial $3 million announced in
April 2015 as an 18-month award, followed byan additional 18-month award of $1.84 million
announced in October 2016.

ORCID’s Team Expansion, 2016

The grant funded an immediate expansionof the ORCID team, with the hiring of Alice
Meadows as Communications Director andDouglas Wright as Membership Director, as
well as a Global Membership Team comprising
Josh Brown, Regional Director, Europe;
Matthew Buys, Regional Director, Africa andMiddle East; Nobuko Miyairi, Regional Director,
Asia-Pacific; and Lilian Pessoa, Regional
Director, Latin America.
The expansion made possible by theHelmsley grant proved transformational
for ORCID, fueling the developmentof its consortium activity into thecritical element enabling it to be fully
supported by membership fees.

19

The Consortium: ORCID at Scale

2014

Spanish ORCID
Consortium

February

2016

Australian ORCID
Consortium

2017
Linda O’Brien
ORCID Board
Member

2020
Linda O’Brien
ORCID Chair

20

ORCID’s consortium model evolved
dramatically from its earliest iteration,
emerging from a simple transactional
mechanism for revenue generation to becomea portfolio of partnerships that share the loadof adoption and integration, shaped by thevaried dynamics of governmental involvementwith research and education around the world.
“When we first launched the membershipmodel, we were looking for ways to encourageorganizations to join,” said Haak. “We madea decision very early on to offer a threeyear subscription for the price of two, withpayment up front so we’d have the resources
to do outreach. Out of that, we generated
two memberships, in Spain and Denmark,where there was also interest in joining
on the country level; that was where theidea for national-level ORCID consortia firstcame from.” (The Consortium of Andalusian
University Libraries [Consorcio de Bibliotecas
Universitarias de Andalucía, or CBUA] and agroup of Danish universities and research
institutions both became ORCID consortia 		
in the later part of 2014.)
Veronique Kiermer recalled another early
member whose inclusion moved the needle,
although it wasn’t technically a consortium:
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT),
the Portuguese national funding agency. “Itmarked a strong showing of government
interest in ORCID,” she said. “FCT made thepolicy decision that every researcher seeking
national funding needed to have an ORCID
iD. We had a flood of applications for ORCID
records overnight.”

Underlying the evolved ORCID consortium
model is the concept of reciprocity—that while
the consortium enjoys a group discount onbehalf of its members, the benefit comes witha responsibility to help implement
ORCID as an integral part of their systems 		
and workflows.
As it turned out, Australia presented theright combination of elements to provide
a “best practices” scenario for an ORCID
national consortium: strong government
involvement in research infrastructure, atightly interconnected research community,
and a “can-do” entrepreneurial spirit.
“Around 2014, I was involved in the national
research infrastructure conversation inAustralia, and, as Chair of the Council ofAustralian University Libraries ResearchCommittee, I was approached to see if I
would partner with the Australian National
Data Service [ANDS] to bring Laure out for aworkshop around ORCID,” said Linda O’Brien,
who was at the time Pro Vice Chancellor,
Information Services, at Griffith University.
(O’Brien joined the ORCID Board in early 2017,
becoming Chair in 2020.) “I partnered with
Ross Wilkinson, the ANDS Executive Director,
and we put together a workshop with Laureand a group of key stakeholders from acrossall the connected parts of the Australian
research landscape. By the end of the day, I
was very excited by the potential and saying,‘We have to do something with this.’”Australian ORCID Consortium Officiall Launch

From the start, O’Brien was impressed by thebenefit to researchers, who would save a great
deal of time by simply plugging in their ORCID
records whenever needed rather than having
to provide the same information repeatedly(“enter once, reuse often” is an ORCID
mantra). But she was equally struck by thebenefit to institutions, and by the opportunity
to demonstrate national impact within the
global research community more effectively.

“We went to the research office, the university
librarian, and the director of IT simultaneously,
to ensure that when the Vice Chancellor wasapproached to join the consortium, all key
stakeholders were aware of the opportunity,”
said O’Brien. They also arranged to housethe home office with the Australian AccessFederation (AAF), which, as provider of thenational authentication service, shared thevalues and approach of ORCID.

“We set up a small working group, withrepresentation from the research granting
bodies, the IT community, the librarycommunity, and, very importantly, research
management offices, glued together bysome of the national agencies, like ANDS,”
said O’Brien.

The venture was undertaken with theunderstanding that there would need to
be staff on the ground to provide support,
enabling the realization of the national
benefits. “Within the Australian consortium,
we have a technical person manning a help
desk for members so they don’t need to
go directly to ORCID for assistance withintegrations and other issues,” said O’Brien.
“We have a website, we have training
materials, and we share information thatmembers can use to build interest in theirresearcher communities.” These resources
are funded by having each member pay
a consortium fee along with the ORCID
membership fee.

Within institutions, the group reached out to all
the key stakeholders with a document O’Brien
had initially drafted with Natasha Simons of
ANDS, which was improved and ratified by
the working group, outlining the benefits of
ORCID to researchers and their institutions,and the potential national benefit as well.

21

2018
LYRASIS
Consortium
for all US
Universities

2019

ORCID reachedfinancialbreakeven

2020

U.S. Government
ORCID Consortium
DOE OSTI

2020
2021

ORCID posted
surplus22

The Australian ORCID consortium launched in
February 2016, with Canada and New Zealandsoon drawing on its example in forming theirown consortia.
But in the US, the situation was more
complicated, presenting a different
constellation of challenges. “We started
with publishers, and since there are a limited
number of big players, we could cover theirmembership fairly easily,” said VeroniqueKiermer. “But there was a very strong casefor academic research institutions, whichwere more complicated, because it wasn’t
immediately clear whom to talk to. Is it thelibrary? Is it the administration?”
Initially, a one-by-one approach was
deployed, which could be helpful by way of
demonstration; having signed up at Harvard,
for example, could be very influential whentalking to other prospects. But it was obvious
this method would never scale effectively, andthe focus shifted to consortium membership.
At the time, there were three regional US
library consortia: NorthEast Research
Libraries (NERL), Greater Western Library
Alliance (GWLA), and Big Ten Academic
Alliance. Institutions that had originally joined
ORCID on their own began to be amalgamatedinto these consortia; Cornell University, forexample, which had originally signed up as anindividual member, became part of NERL andfrom then on participated in ORCID throughit. But these consortia were primarily buying
cartels, without a strong sense of reciprocity.

“And then an amazing thing happened,” said
Haak. “In 2018, these library consortia got
together to form a single ORCID consortium
for all US universities, with LYRASIS, a nonprofit
member organization, as the administrative
home. They’ve done a great job, providing asingle point of contact and fabulous support.
And that is how we were able to transformthe way ORCID is managed in the US from astraight-on subscription model into an actual
community.”
ORCID US Community, as the unified libraryconsortium is known, now has more than
150 members. A separate consortium, US
Government ORCID Consortium, led by the US
Department of Energy Office of Scientific andTechnical Information (DOE OSTI), was formed
in 2020 to accommodate the administrativerequirements of federal agencies, but the twoentities “talk” to each other regularly.
Within the EU, countries have adopted a rangeof consortium models; most are community
driven, some are government driven, andsome are a mix. By way of example, the Italianconsortium is government funded, while theNetherlands consortium is fully community
driven and funded, comprising all the Dutch
universities as well as GEANT, a pan-European
data network for research and education,and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences (KNAW). While the EU itself has
played no role in the formation of ORCID
consortia within its member states, it hashelped motivate consortium initiatives
through efforts like Horizon 2020, a researchand innovation funding program that ran
from 2014 through 2020.

2022

25 national
ORCID consortia
across 6
continents

During the first few years of all this, theBoard had deliberated extensively on what
the consortium business model would be,
setting pricing and size requirements anddetermining that only nonprofit organizations
could be members. Their findings marked asignificant departure from the business plandeveloped through the Mellon grant. “Thatplan had one cost model for universities,
another for publishers, and yet a third forgovernment agencies,” said Haak. “But if
you look at France, for example, that doesn’twork. How would CNRS [Centre national de larecherche scientifique] join? Is it a university,
a federal agency, or a publisher? It’s all three;they’re merged entities.”

regulations, and South Africa’s TENET for its
focus on establishing ORCID within its trustand identity services, to mention a few. AndLYRASIS was cited for its communicative
excellence in bringing four distinct and farflung communities together into a single,
successful community of practice.

On the international level, ORCID has
recognized the achievements of its national
consortia through an awards program,citing Italy’s CINECA for centrally managing
an ORCID integration of 74 universities,
Germany’s TIB for delivering an exhaustive
legal analysis of ORCID’s privacy policy
to accommodate the country’s stringent

In 2019, ORCID broke even. In both 2020 and
2021, it posted a surplus.

As of mid-2022, there are 25 national ORCID
consortia spread across six continents. Their
operations have allowed the organization toscale up its global presence effectively andefficiently, with the added benefit of giving
ORCID a channel for participation in policy
discussions within the countries of
those consortia.

23

The Trust Program

From the earliest days of ORCID, it wasunderstood that trust would be the sinequa non of its operation, “a handshake
between the individual and all the different
stakeholders in the system,” as Haak put it.
This understanding informed the creation of
the 10 Founding Principles, which are
centered on openness, transparency,
inclusion, and collaboration.
Paglione described how this framework has
played out in day-to-day life. “When peoplesuggested ideas, Laure and I would go back to
the principles, and sometimes we’d say, ‘The
principles don’t allow it,’” she said. “They werevery clear that the iD and all the information
related to it was owned by the individual, andthat ORCID is there just to serve the needsof the community. We never compromisedon that, sometimes to people’s annoyance,
but I would say that that is the reason ORCID
became such a trusted organization.”
Then, in 2016, a small security incident
occurred, triggering a major initiative that gave
rise to the ORCID Trust Program, launched in
October of the year. Because of a system bug,information that ORCID users had designatedas “private” in their records was exposed
for a short time. “Even though much of theinformation was publicly accessible elsewhere,
the individuals hadn’t given ORCID permission
to share it.,” said Paglione. “Although this24

bug affected only 2.5% of ORCID records, we
personally reached out to everyone affected
and apologized, but we also resolved to earnback their trust, to demonstrate that we
deserved it.”A working group of privacy and data
security experts from various community
groups, chaired by Board member Richard
Ikeda of the US National Institutes of Health,
was convened “to help us review and refine
the practices and policies underpinning
the trustworthiness of ORCID,” as Paglione
wrote in the announcement of the program.
The group’s work resulted in a lucid,
comprehensive exposition, featured on a
dedicated page of the ORCID website, of
ORCID’s commitments and its means offulfilling them in the areas of Individual
Control, Reliability, Accountability, 		
and Integrity.
The Trust Program, notable for both its
thoroughness and its breadth and depth ofcommunity input, has drawn wider attention
for its effectiveness. Chris Shillum noted that
“People often think of ORCID as primarily
running a technical infrastructure, but theprocess of putting together this article has
reinforced for me just how central building
community and establishing trust has been
to ORCID’s success.”Community-Driven,

Strategic Governance
In ORCID’s early days, the Board substantiallyoutnumbered the employees. In 2014, the thirdyear of ORCID’s operations, its staff of eight
was barely half the size of the Board, with its
15 Directors. Ed Pentz described the dynamicof those times: “For the first couple of years
after Laure and Laura came on, the people on
the Board were very hands-on, focusing on
nuts-and-bolts issues, helping to get things up
and running.” Board members were involvedin marketing, fundraising, setting budgets,and technical matters, things that in a matureorganization would be handled by staff. But by
the end of 2015, fueled by the Helmsley grant,
the staff had grown to 21, and as the venture
expanded and evolved towards sustainability,
there was a corresponding shift in governancetowards a focus that was more strategic, 		less operational.

That said, Haak emphasized that thefoundation in place was a solid one. “Theoriginal Board did a terrific job of articulating
what ORCID is, and of setting up the initial
set of principles,” she said. “And [consulting
legal counsel] Jackie Ewenstein was fabulous,
involved in everything you can imagine having
to do with governance, helping me with somany questions as I was learning on the fly.”
To advance ORCID’s commitment tocommunity-driven governance, and in
the context of ORCID’s broadened base of
support among its institutional members,
an amendment to the bylaws was passed
that moved the Board from a model of selfperpetuation (voting on its own new orcontinuing members) to election from 		and by ORCID’s member organizations,starting in 2016.

ORCID’s Team, 201525

O’Brien also helped institute a more systematic
process of Board self-assessment, and she
initiated the expansion and clarification of theSecretary to the Board’s role to include taking
minutes at meetings, which had previously
been done by the Executive Director. The
reassignment resulted in more comprehensive
record keeping while freeing up the Executive
Director to participate fully in discussions.

ORCID Board, 2017

Veronique Kiermer, who served as Chairfrom 2017 through 2019, a period of strong
Board development, spoke of the challenge ofreshaping its role: “As the organization scaled,
we still had many of the same people on the
Board, but the relationship between the Boardand the management had to start shiftingfrom a situation where Board members were
doing much of the work to one where theorganization’s leadership was making thedecisions, with the Board providing oversightand validation. As Chair, I experienced that asa delicate and difficult shift.”With her extensive background in business
management, Board member Linda O’Brien
made several important contributions to theprocess, notably by proposing and drafting a
Board Charter (approved in September 2019)that Kiermer characterized as “really helping tocrystallize the roles of the Board and the staff.”

26

Kiermer also cited a development in how
fiduciary responsibility was upheld. “When
I was Chair and met with new Directors to
onboard them, I would ask them to state anycompeting interest they might have,” she said,“then we occasionally ran into situations wherethese potential competing interests had to be
declared when discussing a specific topic ina Board meeting. This has now evolved, with
Linda [O’Brien became Chair in 2020] asking
at the beginning of each meeting whether
there are any competing interests for the
topics under discussion, a formalization of theprocess that is much more professional.”
To ensure that Board composition includes
a strong researcher component, in 2016a researcher Board seat was established,with a second added in spring 2017. In 2021,
the Nominating Committee under Kiermer
retooled its solicitation process to attract
more researchers and in May 2021, the ORCID
Researcher Advisory Council was launched toprovide the ORCID Board and staff with input
on the organization’s policies, strategies,
usability, and communications.

Looking Forward

may

2018

GlobalParticipation
Program launchedseptember2022

15 million ORCID
records

In the spring of 2022, with the 10th anniversaryof its launch on the horizon, ORCID received amajor infusion of support for its global mission
in the form of nearly $1 million in startup loan
forgiveness. The generous consideration, by
10 of the original lenders, funded the Global
Participation Program, providing grants topromote participation in ORCID in currently
under-represented regions, including muchof the Global South. The program underpins
one of the key pillars of ORCID’s 2022–2025
Strategic Plan, “From Vision to Value.”
With more than 15 million ORCID iDs live
as of late 2022, there is no question that
ORCID is firmly established in the researchcommunity, an achievement that conveys an
ongoing responsibility. “One of the lessons
we can take from ORCID is that investment ininfrastructure, when it’s done well, can really
pay off,” said Kiermer. “There hasn’t always
been the strongest commitment to that in thescholarly and research ecosystem. ORCID isa good example, and it’s very important that
we evaluate and improve its processes andgovernance structure on a regular basis.”That ongoing process of evaluation andimprovement is well articulated in the 2022–
2025 Strategic Plan, with a road map not only
for increasing global participation but also
for advancing ORCID’s usability and value
for members and researchers alike, and forfortifying its sustainability, reliability, andtrustworthiness. And while that 15 million is
an impressive number, it is likely just part of amuch larger pool of potential registrants. “It’snot just people with Ph.D.s who contributeto research and development,” said Haak.

“There are librarians, grants officers, program
managers, and many others who are part ofthis ecosystem, who contribute more than halfof their job time to R&D activities.”
From a certain point of view, the story of
ORCID is the story of its successful progression
through a series of “bubbles,” as Salvatore
Mele has called them. “In the beginning, there
was the publisher bubble, and then the elite
institution bubble,” he said. “Then there was
the funding agency bubble, working throughthe consortia, and then, around the time I left,
in 2020, a Global North research bubble. Everytime, ORCID has succeeded in getting out of
its comfort zone and bursting the bubble toengage with a wider partnership.”
From the beginning, ORCID has strived tokeep researchers at the center, with the goalof guaranteeing reliable attribution of theirwork embodied in Founding Principle number
one. So, how is that working out?
“I was speaking at a recent Mozilla Festival,and I met someone in the humanities who
was doing work on the history of currencies,”
said Laura Paglione. “I mentioned to him thatthe first time I had come to the festival, I was
the Founding Technical Director of ORCID.
‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘ORCID has changed mylife. Now our young researchers actually get
recognized for the work that they do.’”27

Special thanks to John Lehmann-Haupt, author of “ORCID’s First Decade: From Startup
to Sustainability. Also to Amy Brand, Laure Haak, Veronique Kiermer, Dave Kochalko,
Salvatore Mele, Linda O’Brien, Laura Paglione, Ed Pentz, Howard Ratner, Chris Shillum,
MacKenzie Smith, and Simeon Warner for sharing their recollections for this document.