Last week SSRN’s CEO Gregg Gordon joined the rest of the ORCID leadership team for the ORCID Board meeting in Amsterdam, and also hosted a meeting between ORCID and Elsevier at the company HQ in Amsterdam’s Radarweg office.

If you’re not familiar with ORCID’s work, ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a global, not-for-profit organisation supported by fees from organisations such as Elsevier in the scholarly communications space. It’s community-built and governed by a board of directors designed to represent a wide range of stakeholders who care about identity in scholarship. Gregg joined the board last year and will serve until the end of 2025.

A small group in person in the office and a much larger group online via Zoom were able to hear the latest news from the ORCID team in a session hosted by former Elsevier tech guru Chris Shillum, who now leads ORCID as Executive Director. The team shared ORCID’s vision to establish a unique identifier for people who contribute to the scholarly record, so that their work can be correctly connected to their contributions “across disciplines, borders, and time.”

ORCID tries to do this by providing three pieces of infrastructure for scholarship: The first is the ORCID identifier itself, which is a unique free-of- charge ID for researchers. The second is the ORCID profile which is a digital CV for scholars, allowing them to share details of their employment, education, funding, and other metadata with the rest of the world. Finally ORCID has a set of APIs to enable interoperability between an ORCID record and ORCID’s member organisations.

In the presentation at Elsevier, Chris and the team shared ORCID’s strategic priorities for this year, which include increasing the value it offers to member and researchers, getting more people to participate with ORCID, and a new goal around upholding trust which aims to address the current crisis in scholarly integrity.

The team fielded lots of questions from different Elsevier folks keen to learn more about their work and how we can best support ORCID in our products and it was nice to see Chris back on familiar turf, as it’s several years since he was last in the Elsevier office.
You can learn more about ORCID’s work here, and below you can see the ORCID Board braving a particuarly cold February day before the board meeting – Gregg needed that scarf…