ORCID and me: a researcher’s passport across time, a journey in three Acts
Research thoughts bite: 07.
When I saw on LinkedIn at the end of August 2025 that ORCID has reached 10 million active users, I thought back to its earliest days and my own involvement spanning the journey ORCID took throughout the years. I see three clear “acts”:
Act I: Infancy – planting the seeds (2012–2015)
In the early 2010s, I was Head of Research Information at the University of Cambridge Research Strategy Office, working closely with Danny Kingsley and the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University Library. ORCID was a bold new idea: a persistent digital identifier for every researcher. But would it take root?
The UK’s commitment began with the Jisc/ARMA ORCID pilot (2014–2015). Funded projects at eight universities including Glasgow, Oxford, UCL, and Manchester, were tasked with testing integrations and sharing experiences. As Verena Weigert of Jisc put it, the pilot aimed to “develop a community of practice around implementation of ORCID identifiers by HEIs.” (source).
The UK-wide pilot, launched in May 2014, reinforced this exploratory spirit: each university developed its own use cases, from tracking early-career researchers to integrating ORCID into repositories and CRIS systems, and even embedding ORCIDs into HR records for new staff. Collectively, these experiments tested not only technical possibilities but also cultural appetite.
At the University of Cambridge, we faced a central decision on how to deal with ORCID in our own institution:
Top-down: assign ORCIDs to everyone automatically
Bottom-up: encourage voluntary uptake
We chose the bottom-up path, respecting researchers’ independence. It carried risks, but also aligned with the spirit of academic ownership.
To me, ORCID always represented more than just an identifier. Researchers lead nomadic lives, moving between institutions, countries, and disciplines. ORCID promised to be their research passport: a lightweight, portable identity that travelled with them, connecting their outputs wherever they went. Being in for the long game, I expected to see the benefits in a couple of years’ time.
Act II: Adolescence – building a community (2015–2020)
By 2015, the pilots matured into something larger: the UK ORCID Consortium (NB: Many more national ORCID communities evolved around that time - not just limited to the UK). What began as scattered local experiments became a nationally coordinated effort led by Jisc.
By the consortium’s five-year anniversary in 2020, the progress was clear:
Membership had grown from 45 institutions in 2015 to 99 in 2020.
ORCID uptake quintupled, from 50,000 IDs to 250,000 linked to UK university emails.
The community hosted 29 events with 700+ participants, strengthening practice through workshops, hackdays, and training.
Technical integrations matured, with institutions moving toward single points of truth rather than piecemeal connections.
The community itself drove innovation, from the EPrints Advance plugin to the Community ORCID Dashboard (COrDa).
Policy momentum grew: funders like UKRI and The Wellcome Trust signed the ORCID Funders Open Letter (2018), while the Tickell Report called for funder mandates and broader PID strategies.
By the end of this period, I was no longer at Cambridge. Watching from outside the university world, I could see how ORCID had shifted from fragile pilots to a trusted community of practice. The “passport” metaphor was becoming reality and ORCID was now embedded into workflows and recognised by both institutions and funders.
Act III: Maturity – ORCID today and tomorrow (2020–2025)
Today, ORCID stands as a global cornerstone of research infrastructure. As mentioned at the beginning with 10 million active users, it is recognised worldwide by publishers, funders, and universities.
In 2022, my colleague Simon Porter at Digital Science explored this maturity in Measuring Research Information Citizenship Across ORCID Practice. Taking a scientometric lens and drawing on the Dimensions dataset, he examined how ORCID is adopted across researchers, publishers, and funders. The study revealed an emerging “research information citizenry”; a landscape where ORCID adoption is not just individual but systemic, knitting together the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders.
The vision is not yet complete: interoperability across systems remains uneven (a situation since my early days in this business) and seamless portability of outputs is still a work in progress. Adoption also varies between regions and disciplines. Yet, the trajectory is unmistakable:
From pilots and opt-in choices (2014).
To national coordination and policies (2015–2020).
To global maturity and recognition, now analysed and tracked through scientometrics and datasets like the public ORCID data set and Dimensions.
I think researchers remain nomads, but now with a digital passport that allows them to travel lighter, be recognised faster (and more efficiently), and spend less time re-entering data and more time doing research. Point in case is my own journey from researchers in different institutions and countries, different employers and types of institutions and now, while being VP Research Evaluation and Global Challenges at Digital Science, I have my up-to-date ORCID profile readily available; Biography and outputs/DOIs in one neat single profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7757-8001 for the curious.
Reflecting on my own journey mirrors this arc. I began at Cambridge, helping to test ORCID in its infancy. Today, I am at Digital Science, working with colleagues like Simon Porter and international partners such as the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) on the next stage: not just adopting identifiers, but making them work together.
Commissioned by ARDC, our PID Benchmarking Toolkit supports Australia’s National PID Strategy. It translates high-level ambitions into SMART benchmarks (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), enabling agencies and institutions to track progress across the research lifecycle including:
Inputs: grants, projects, infrastructure.
Processes: affiliations, researcher identities, workflows.
Outputs: articles, datasets, software, non-traditional research outputs.
And in 2025, openness took another leap and step forward: ORCID partnered with Digital Science to host the annual ORCID Public Data File directly in Dimensions on Google BigQuery, you may remember our research metric bite. For over a decade, ORCID has released its public dataset openly, but its sheer size made it hard to use. Hosting it on GBQ changes this: anyone can now query, explore, and link ORCID data at scale, without heavy technical barriers.
The implications are wide-ranging: mapping collaboration networks, tracking scientific migrations, linking ORCID with datasets like the World Bank, or analysing adoption trends across disciplines. With over 190,000 downloads to date, the Public Data File was already a vital resource. Now, through Dimensions on GBQ, it becomes a living, accessible tool for the global research community.
So, the arc that began with little isolated pilots now extends into a global effort to ensure identifiers like ORCID are not only used, but also analysed, benchmarked, and valued.
Final thought
From the green shoots of pilots, through the maturing UK consortium (not limited to the UK of course, I also know the German and the Austrian one), to today’s international benchmarking and open data analytics, ORCID’s story has been one of growth, resilience, and vision. For me, it has been a privilege to walk alongside this journey: first in helping seeds take root, and now in measuring and guiding their flourishing worldwide.
A decade ago, I imagined ORCID as a passport for research nomads. Today, that vision is real and with global benchmarking and open data access, we are learning how to ensure those passports are not just carried, but truly valued.