ORCID in Germany - A project-driven success story

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID ORCID strives to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. ORCID is therefore an essential piece of the puzzle for increasing the discoverability of researchers by disambiguating them from all the other researchers with the same or even a similar name and definitively connecting them with their research contribution metadata (e.g. their scholarly record). Furthermore, ORCID specifically addresses each of the FAIR findability principle components. The international non-profit organization ORCID, on which the initiative is based, already connects over 14 million persons worldwide with their research outcomes. In order to promote the widespread implementation of ORCID at universities and non-university research institutions in Germany, the project "ORCID DE" was launched and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). With the development of claiming services for the national bibliography of the German National Library and the BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources, ORCID DE provides central tools for shaping the distribution and quality of metadata of scholarly communication from Germany. Furthermore the project fosters the interconnection of ORCID with other persistent identification (PID) systems and therefore contributes to more discoverability, accessibility, and visibility of research outcomes. As coordinator of the project, the Helmholtz Open Science Office makes an important contribution to improving scientific information management in the context of Open Science Further project partners of ORCID DE are Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld, DataCite - International Data Citation Initiative e. V. and Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hannover.