Federation partner
ORCID
ORCID provides the persistent identifier that anchors every contributor assertion. CRediT roles travel from publishers through Crossref into a researcher's ORCID record, giving each contribution a stable home.
What ORCID provides
ORCID issues a free, persistent identifier — the ORCID iD — for every researcher who registers. The iD is a 16-digit number with a checksum, expressed as a URI such as https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097. It travels with the researcher across institutional moves, name changes, and disciplinary shifts, and it is recognised by funders, publishers, repositories, and research information systems worldwide.
Within the CASRAI stack the ORCID iD is the canonical way to refer to a person. A CRediT role assigned to "J. Smith" is ambiguous; a CRediT role assigned to 0000-0002-1825-0097 is not.
How CRediT reaches an ORCID record
The flow is well established and runs through Crossref:
- A publisher collects CRediT role assertions from authors at submission, typically via a structured form keyed to ORCID iDs.
- On publication, the publisher deposits the article metadata to Crossref, including the
contributorblock with CRediT roles per ORCID iD. - Crossref makes the metadata available via its REST API and pushes work updates to the ORCID record of each contributor whose iD is present in the deposit.
- The researcher's ORCID record then displays the article together with the CRediT roles the publisher recorded.
ORCID's guidance to researchers explains how to review and accept work updates pushed by Crossref and other trusted sources. See ORCID's FAQ on contributor information for works.
Why ORCID is central
CRediT without persistent identifiers degrades into the same problem string-matched authorship has always had: collisions on common names, broken trails across institutional moves, and no machine-readable way to reconcile a person's contributions across publishers. ORCID solves the identity problem CRediT depends on. Without ORCID the CRediT signal does not aggregate cleanly at the researcher level; with ORCID it does.
The relationship is reciprocal. ORCID has supported contributor-role work since at least 2015, when it published its statement on contributor recognition, CRediT, and contributorship badges. The contributor-role fields in ORCID's data model anticipated the eventual standardisation of CRediT.
How CASRAI federates with ORCID
- Every contributor mentioned on this site is referenced by ORCID iD where one exists.
- Examples in the implementation guide show CRediT-bearing Crossref deposits keyed to ORCID iDs.
- Where a CRediT role is asserted in dictionary content, the related-people field uses ORCID iDs rather than free-text names.
- The cross-walk documentation references the ORCID work-update mechanism so implementers understand the round-trip from deposit to researcher profile.
