Cambridge University Press and ORCID

ORCID is a not-for-profit organization governed by an elected board. It provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID ID) for individual researchers, and a registry of those identifiers, to support automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities and affiliations, through  integration in research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission.

 ORCID has two key features:

• Unique, persistent identifiers for individuals that can be authenticated via an API in various systems across the publishing world. These can be used as reliable means of identifying authors, disambiguating author names within publisher, society, funder and institutional databases, and for transferring information between those databases.
• A registry of those identifiers, with validated, collated information on researchers' professional activities, publications and affiliations across the multiple organisations with which they engage. This registry can be updated and queried by ORCID members (subject to user privacy settings).

ORCID also offers robust permissions and data privacy protections, giving researchers total control over the data they store on their record and the data made publicly visible. For up-to-date information on privacy see https://orcid.org/about/trust/home.

How will Cambridge University Press use my ORCID?

Many of our journals now require the corresponding author of an article to submit an ORCID ID before they can submit their paper. For all other journals, provision of an ORCID ID is optional but highly encouraged.

If you provide your ID during submission via Scholar One or Editorial Manager, we will:

• Store it as part of the metadata related to your article and send it to CrossRef. If you give permission to CrossRef, this means that your ORCID record can be automatically updated with the publication when they register the DOI.
• Display it on your published article on Core, with a link to your ORCID record so that readers can easily find more information about your other research contributions.

Longer term we’d like to use ORCID IDs to benefit the readers of the research we publish too – for example, using these unique identifiers to accurately recommend articles written by the same author.

Why are you requiring ORCID for corresponding authors of some Cambridge journals?

We believe that higher ORCID uptake is going to provide benefits across the whole research ecosystem – for authors, researchers, institutions, funders and publishers alike. Used properly, ORCIDs enable greater discoverability for research publications, efficiencies for publisher and funder systems and convenience for researchers when managing multiple accounts and activities.

These positives increase the uptake of ORCID, so as a publisher we can play our part in establishing ORCID as a new industry standard by asking our authors to provide their iD at the point of article submission.

How should I provide my ORCID ID?

You’ll need to submit your ID by using the special field in the submission systems for some Cambridge journals. When you click on the button to provide your ID, you will be taken to the ORCID page to log in so that we can check that you’re the owner of the ID and make sure you’ve given us permission to use it. Once you've associated your ID with your submission system account, it can be published on any subsequent articles that you submit and publish with us.

You can find out more about providing your ORCID ID on the ORCID blog, here.

Is there a cost to me for my ORCID?

No, ORCID IDs are free to researchers. Cambridge University Press has a membership to ORCID and it is memberships like ours that help to fund the organisation.

Where can I find out more?

See our downloadable guide to ORCID here.