The trajectory of ORCID iD requirements across major funders has been steady through 2018-2025: voluntary for PIs, recommended for PIs, required for PIs, and now in 2026 increasingly required for co-investigators and other named project personnel. This post is a practical map of the requirements as they stand in mid-2026, with attention to the operational implications for institutions handling cross-funder applications.
The PI requirement
For principal investigators, ORCID iDs are now effectively required across the major Western funders. UKRI requires the PI’s ORCID iD at application; the seven research councils’ submission system pre-fills bibliographic data from the ORCID record where available. The Wellcome Trust, the major UK charities, and the major European national funders (DFG, ANR, NWO, the Swiss SNSF, the Spanish AEI) have similar requirements.
The US federal funders have moved more cautiously. NIH requires ORCID iDs in the biosketch via the SciENcv tool; NSF requires ORCID iDs for personnel in current-and-pending support; DOE, DOD, NASA, USDA have varying requirements with a convergent direction. The 2025 update to the Common Forms work standardised the ORCID requirement across federal-funder personnel forms, with the binding date in 2026.
EU funding (Horizon Europe, ERC) requires ORCID iDs for PIs and an increasingly complete coverage of co-investigators. The Funding & Tenders Portal integrates with ORCID for bibliographic data retrieval.
For PIs, the practical posture is that an ORCID iD is now table stakes. The CASRAI funder applicant guide tracks the per-funder requirements.
The co-investigator expansion
The 2026 development is the expansion of ORCID requirements to co-investigators and other named project personnel.
UKRI’s 2025-2026 transition expanded the ORCID requirement to all named investigators on an application. The Funding Service expects ORCID iDs for everyone listed.
NIH’s pilot to require ORCID iDs for all senior/key personnel began in 2025 and is now standard practice. Co-investigators without ORCID iDs cannot be listed.
The EU Horizon Europe expansion is in progress, with the Funding & Tenders Portal expected to require ORCID iDs for all consortium personnel by end-2026.
For institutions, this means the ORCID-iD adoption work that previously focused on PIs now needs to cover the entire research staff. Most research-intensive universities are at or near saturation for PIs; the broader staff coverage is lower and the expansion requires sustained adoption work.
The structured-data side
The funder ORCID requirements are about more than identifier collection. The funders increasingly consume structured data from ORCID at application time and write structured data back at award time.
At application: funders pull biographical sketches, affiliation history, prior funding, and publication lists from ORCID. The applicant’s ORCID record becomes the source-of-truth for these data; the funder’s application system displays them with allow-edit-but-prefer-ORCID semantics. This is a substantial UX improvement over the previous pattern of researchers re-typing their bibliographic data into each funder’s system.
At award: funders write the award itself to ORCID as a funding-record entry, and increasingly the project as a RAiD reference. The researcher’s ORCID record accumulates a complete funding history without manual entry.
The ORCID 4.0 contribution model (discussed in our earlier post on the IDR roadmap) is the underlying schema that supports this. Funders that have implemented the 4.0 deposit patterns can write rich structured data; funders still on 3.x produce thinner records.
Operational implications for institutions
Three operational priorities for research-administration offices.
First, institutional ORCID-iD coverage. Run a coverage audit: what fraction of your research staff have ORCID iDs, and are those iDs current and verified? Where coverage is incomplete, run an institutional ORCID-iD adoption campaign. Many institutions have done this for PIs and need to extend it to early-career researchers, postdocs, and research-staff categories that were previously deprioritised.
Second, ORCID-integration in CRIS. Your CRIS should be reading from and writing to ORCID for affiliated researchers. The CRIS-ORCID integration patterns are well-documented; the CASRAI CRIS integration guide walks through them per major CRIS vendor. The integration removes substantial duplicate-data-entry burden from researchers.
Third, application-support workflow. Your application-support workflow should be ORCID-anchored: the researcher’s ORCID record is the source for biographical data; the application’s data-entry tools should pull from ORCID by default; any application-specific data should be entered once and propagated to ORCID where appropriate.
The edge cases
Three edge cases deserve flagging.
First, researchers without ORCID iDs. As funder requirements tighten, researchers without iDs become unable to apply. The case is straightforward to resolve (registration takes minutes) but the institutional support to ensure no researcher is blocked at application time is non-trivial.
Second, researchers with duplicate or fragmented ORCID records. Some researchers have multiple ORCID iDs from different registration events; some have records that are out of date or incomplete. The ORCID record merge process and the institutional support for record cleanup are not always smooth. Institutional ORCID-administrator workflows should handle these cases.
Third, international researchers. ORCID is a global infrastructure but adoption varies by country and discipline. International collaborators on a US- or EU-funded project may not have ORCID iDs; the application workflow needs to accommodate getting them registered. Many institutions have built bridge-support for this scenario.
The 2027 trajectory
Looking forward, the trajectory through 2027 is clear. ORCID iDs will be required not just for personnel but for funded outputs (publications, datasets, software) at the deposit step. The funder’s compliance tracking will run on the ORCID-anchored graph: did the awarded researcher produce the outputs they committed to, were the outputs FAIR-compliant, were the contributors recognised with CRediT roles? The institutional infrastructure to support this picture is most of what current adoption work is building.
For institutions, the strategic implication is to treat ORCID adoption not as a compliance item but as research-infrastructure investment. The return on the investment compounds: each researcher with a complete ORCID record reduces friction across every subsequent application, every output deposit, every reporting cycle. The institutions that did the work in 2022-2025 are reaping the benefit in 2026; those that have not are still doing the manual work.
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