The most important scientific publishers in physics and chemistry encourage researchers to register with ORCID. They collect ORCIDs in their manuscript submission and peer review systems and some include ORCIDs in the articles themselves.

Only some journals require an ORCID. But others will follow. When submitting a paper to a journal of the American Chemical Society corresponding authors are required to provide their own personal ORCID before completing the submission process. SpringerNature is running a six-month trial to mandate ORCIDs for authors publishing across 46 of their journals (e.g. Nature Chemistry; Nature Physics).

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a non-profit organization which aims to establish a registry for author identificaton as the de facto standard like the ISBN for books or the DOI for online publications.

Benefits of having an ORCID:

• solves the name ambiguity problem (name equivalence, change of name, different spelling)
• associates your scientific output (articles, datasets and others) with your biography
• updates your publication list in your ORCID profile automatically – you can enable automatic updates from data providers, e.g. CrossRef, Scopus, ResearcherID – Web of Science
• simplifies communication, e.g. for grant submissions, article submissions or meeting registrations