ORCID - Open Researcher & Contributor ID - is an international, interdisciplinary, open and not-for-profit organisation committed to enhancing the scientific discovery process, improving collaboration and increasing the efficiency of research funding.

ORCID aims to achieve this by solving the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications. A recent article in Nature explains the problems of indistinguishable names in scholarly records and outlines ORCID strategies to address this.

By creating an international registry of presistent unique identifiers for individual researchers, ORCID will present an open and transparent linking mechanism with other ID schemes and research objects, including research grants, publications and patents.

ORCID is currently open for individual and organisational memberships, and aims to be operational in late 2012.