ORCID has published its next strategic plan, ORCID 2030: Advancing the Future of Research, setting direction for the organization’s work from 2026 through 2029. The plan succeeds ORCID’s previous 2022–2025 strategy, From Vision to Value, and was developed over 2025 through a SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results) planning process involving ORCID’s Board, staff, member consortia, and its Researcher Advisory Council.
Where the prior plan focused on establishing ORCID’s trust and value as the standard researcher identifier, ORCID frames the new plan as a shift toward what it describes as a “more active, expansive role in empowering the future of research globally,” positioning the ORCID iD and the underlying ORCID record as a verifiable identity and contribution data hub rather than solely an identifier registry.
The Five Strategic Themes
ORCID 2030 is organized around five themes:
1. Empowering Researchers
Expanding the value ORCID offers to researchers across disciplines and career stages, making the platform “smarter” to reduce the manual effort of maintaining a record, and helping researchers get visibility and recognition for a wider range of contributions — not just traditional authorship.
2. Connecting Research Information
Reinforcing ORCID’s core role as what the plan calls the key source of verifiable identity and contribution data, through improved data completeness and deeper integrations with the member organizations, publishers, funders, and institutions that read from and write to ORCID records via the ORCID API.
3. Broadening Our Community
Growing global participation in ORCID, including expansion into adjacent use cases such as research security and research administration workflows — areas where a verified researcher identity is increasingly a prerequisite rather than a convenience. ORCID’s 2026 memorandum of understanding with China’s CSTR identifier platform, aimed at persistent-identifier interoperability, is an early example of this community-broadening push; see CASRAI’s coverage of the ORCID-CSTR MOU.
4. Advancing Trust and Integrity
Addressing research integrity problems partly through the open dissemination of what ORCID calls Trust Markers, and exploring how ORCID intersects with broader digital identity infrastructure and verification standards.
5. Strengthening ORCID’s Resiliency
Ensuring ORCID’s own long-term sustainability as a nonprofit through financial growth, operational efficiency, cybersecurity, and a stated intent to apply AI responsibly in its own operations.
Why This Matters for Research Administrators
ORCID iDs are already embedded in a growing list of institutional and funder requirements. NIH now requires an ORCID-linked SciENcv biosketch, a requirement CASRAI covered when NIH began enforcing it (see NIH Common Forms enforcement, May 2026). Funder-level ORCID mandates continue to expand (see CASRAI’s 2026 funder ORCID requirements landscape), and U.S. institutions are separately working through their own deadlines tied to the federal digital-persistent-identifier policy, covered in Universities Set Their Own ORCID Deadlines for 2026. The 2030 plan’s emphasis on research security and research administration as growth areas, and on deeper member integrations, signals that research offices, grants administrators, and CRIS/RIMS teams should expect ORCID to keep expanding into workflows beyond the researcher-facing profile page — not simply maintain the status quo identifier registration and lookup function it has served to date.
The plan’s “Advancing Trust and Integrity” theme is also notable given the volume of authorship-fraud and identity-verification stories in scholarly publishing; ORCID positioning itself around verifiable Trust Markers is a direct response to that pressure.
Key Figures
As of ORCID’s most recent public reporting, the organization counts more than 1,500 member organizations across 69 countries and reports over 10.5 million active users of the ORCID registry — the base the 2030 plan is scaling from.
What’s Not Yet Confirmed
ORCID has announced a Town Hall webinar (March 25, 2026) to walk through the plan in more detail; specific operational milestones, budget commitments, and rollout timelines for individual initiatives under each theme had not been published in detail as of this writing. Institutions and CRIS teams evaluating what the plan means for their own ORCID integrations should watch ORCID’s own communications and info.orcid.org for the operational detail as it is released, rather than treating the high-level themes summarized here as a committed roadmap with fixed dates.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ORCID 2030?
ORCID 2030: Advancing the Future of Research is ORCID’s strategic plan covering 2026 through 2029, succeeding its 2022–2025 plan, From Vision to Value. It sets five thematic priorities for the organization rather than a single roadmap of features.
Does ORCID 2030 change how researchers use their ORCID iD today?
Not immediately. The plan sets direction and priorities rather than announcing specific new product features with dates attached. Researchers, institutions, and system integrators should expect ORCID’s existing record model, API, and integration patterns to continue functioning as documented, with change communicated through ORCID’s usual member and developer channels as individual initiatives are scoped.
How does ORCID 2030 relate to the growing number of ORCID mandates from funders and institutions?
The plan doesn’t itself create new mandates — those come from individual funders and institutions, such as NIH’s SciENcv/ORCID linkage requirement or U.S. federal digital-persistent-identifier policy. But the plan’s “Broadening Our Community” theme, which explicitly names research administration and research security as growth areas, suggests ORCID expects that mandate trend to continue and is planning its own infrastructure accordingly.
Where can I read the plan directly?
ORCID has published the plan and supporting materials at info.orcid.org, including a dedicated ORCID 2030 strategic plan page.
