Two 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.

ORCID, was established in 2010 as non-profit organisation serving the research community. You may contact the Executive Director Laure Haak at l.haak@orcid.org and follow @ORCID_Org on Twitter.

CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association of scholarly publishers. Since its founding in 2000, CrossRef has provided reference linking services for over 56 million content items, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, reference entries, technical reports, standards, and data sets.

As part of the ORCID Registry, individuals can search the metadata from CrossRef, the largest organisation assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to scholarly content, and add their works to their personal ORCID records.

The ultimate goal is to have the ORCID unique identifier associated with the article DOI whenever a scholarly contribution is made or reported. Read the full article here.