An ORCID account’s visibility settings determine exactly who can see each piece of information on a researcher’s record. Every data field — from employment history to individual publications — can be set to one of three tiers: Everyone (public), Trusted Parties (limited to authorised organisations and collaborators), or Only Me (private). Getting these defaults right, especially for name, email and affiliation data, directly affects whether funders, publishers and institutions can verify a researcher’s identity for reporting and auto-update purposes.
An ORCID account is a free, persistent digital identifier record, maintained by the non-profit organisation ORCID Inc., that distinguishes one researcher from every other researcher with a similar name. The identifier itself — the 16-digit ORCID iD — is always public once issued, but everything attached to it (works, funding, employment, education, email) is visibility-controlled by the account holder.
- What is an ORCID account, and what does it record?
- The three ORCID visibility tiers explained
- How visibility settings interact with auto-updates
- How visibility affects funder reporting and institutional access
- Best-practice default settings for early-career researchers
- Answer-first Q&A
What is an ORCID account, and what does it record?
ORCID — Open Researcher and Contributor ID — is a non-profit organisation founded in 2012 to issue persistent digital identifiers to researchers, distinct from the name-matching systems used by individual publishers or databases. An ORCID account holds a researcher’s iD alongside optional record fields: employment and education history, funding, peer review activity, and a list of works (articles, datasets, preprints, patents).
Registration is free for individual researchers and takes only a few minutes. Institutions, funders and publishers can separately join as fee-paying ORCID member organisations, which is what allows them to integrate ORCID sign-in and read/write access into their own systems — this membership layer is unrelated to whether an individual researcher pays anything for their account.
The three ORCID visibility tiers explained
Every field on an ORCID record carries its own visibility setting, and different fields can carry different settings simultaneously. There is no single account-wide switch — a researcher might keep their publication list public while keeping their employer-assigned email address private.
| Visibility tier | Who can see it | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone | Any visitor to the public ORCID website, the ORCID public API, and ORCID’s annual public data file | Publications, employment, education — information a researcher wants discoverable and citable |
| Trusted Parties | Only the specific trusted individuals or trusted organisations the account holder has explicitly authorised | Detailed CV data shared with a specific funder, publisher or institutional system during review or reporting |
| Only Me | Only the account holder, when logged in | Draft entries, personal notes, or an email address the researcher does not want harvested |
By default, ORCID sets a newly registered researcher’s name to Everyone visibility and their email address to Only Me visibility, according to ORCID’s own support documentation. Researchers can change this default for all future entries at any time from the “Visibility preferences” tab in account settings, and can also override visibility item-by-item using the small visibility icon attached to each entry, or apply a setting to several selected items at once using the bulk visibility slider.
How visibility settings interact with auto-updates
ORCID’s auto-update feature lets trusted organisations — most commonly Crossref and DataCite, acting on behalf of publishers and data repositories — add works to a researcher’s record automatically whenever a new DOI is registered against that ORCID iD. This removes the need for researchers to manually re-enter every publication.
The interaction with visibility is important and frequently misunderstood: whatever default visibility a researcher has set for new items is applied to auto-updated entries, exactly as it would be to manually added ones. However, a trusted organisation that has been granted permission to add data to a record retains permanent read access to whatever it added, regardless of the visibility level the researcher later chooses for that item.
- If the account’s default is set to Everyone, auto-updated publications become publicly visible immediately.
- If the default is Only Me, auto-updated works still land on the record but stay private until the researcher changes the setting.
- Trusted organisations can always see the specific entries they added, even under a Trusted Parties or Only Me default.
How visibility affects funder reporting and institutional access
A growing number of funders now require an ORCID iD as a condition of application or award reporting, which makes visibility settings a compliance question, not just a privacy preference. Under Notice NOT-OD-23-109, the US National Institutes of Health requires an ORCID iD from 1 October 2023 for individuals named on institutional research training, career development, fellowship and diversity supplement awards, so that NIH systems can link people to outputs across their career. UKRI has required an ORCID iD from grant applicants since 2021, initially through the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system and subsequently across its wider Funding Service migration.
These funder integrations typically request read access to specific record sections — funding, employment, works — as a trusted organisation rather than requiring the whole record to be public. A researcher can therefore satisfy a funder’s ORCID requirement using Trusted Parties visibility for the sections that funder needs, without exposing that same information to the general public through the Everyone tier. This distinction matters for research administration teams advising staff on compliance: “having an ORCID iD” and “making a record public” are not the same obligation, and conflating them causes researchers to either over-share or wrongly assume they are non-compliant.
Best-practice default settings for early-career researchers
Early-career researchers benefit most from visibility settings that maximise discoverability of scholarly outputs while protecting personal contact and unpublished data. The following defaults reflect common institutional library guidance and ORCID’s own recommendations:
- Name and biography: Everyone — this is what makes a researcher findable and disambiguates them from namesakes in the ORCID public API.
- Employment and education history: Everyone — supports the identity-verification role that underpins authorship attribution across a career.
- Published works added via auto-update: Everyone as the default, reviewed periodically for anything still under embargo.
- Email address: Only Me or Trusted Parties — public email fields are routinely scraped, and ORCID’s own default already protects this field.
- Unpublished or in-review manuscripts, peer review activity: Trusted Parties, so only the relevant journal or funder system can see them until publication.
Reviewing the “Trusted Parties” page periodically to revoke access no longer needed — for example, after leaving an employer whose HR system was granted record access — is good account hygiene and takes only a few minutes.
Answer-first Q&A
What is an ORCID account?
An ORCID account is a free record tied to a persistent 16-digit identifier that distinguishes a researcher from others with similar names. It stores optional details — employment, education, funding, and works — each independently controlled by visibility settings the account holder chooses.
Is an ORCID iD free?
Yes. Registering for an ORCID iD is free for individual researchers and takes only a few minutes to complete. ORCID membership is a separate, fee-based tier for institutions, publishers and funders that integrate ORCID into their own systems — it does not affect individual account cost.
How do I check if I have an ORCID account already?
Search the ORCID database at orcid.org using your name to see whether a record already exists. If no matching entry appears, or none of the results are recognisably yours, you do not yet have an ORCID iD and can proceed to register a new account.
Is ORCID like LinkedIn?
No. ORCID is a non-profit persistent-identifier registry designed to disambiguate researchers and link them to verified scholarly outputs, funding and affiliations. LinkedIn is a commercial professional-networking platform; the two serve different purposes and are not interchangeable for research-administration or funder-reporting use.
What this means going forward
As more funders and publishers wire ORCID into automated reporting pipelines, the account holder’s visibility choices increasingly function as consent settings for institutional data flows, not just personal privacy preferences. Researchers who understand the distinction between the Everyone, Trusted Parties and Only Me tiers — and who periodically audit which organisations hold trusted-party access — retain control over their scholarly identity without sacrificing the discoverability that makes an ORCID account useful in the first place.
