Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs) with the name ‘ORCID’: Risk to the integrity of the ORCID registry

Abstract

It is not uncommon to find journals that mandate an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) for the submitting or corresponding author, and occasionally even for all authors. The logic of that registry, within the context of academic publishing, is to disambiguate the identity of an author, that is, of the research subject, so it is also used in practice to verify an author. Research in recent years has revealed some serious lapses in the ORCID registry, such as the presence of fictitious authors with odd names. In other cases, ORCIDs have been abused by bad actors to legitimise paper mill operations. In this article, we report on another batch of anomalous ORCID accounts. A search on 10 August 2024 revealed a sizable number of ORCIDs that had, as either the first or family name, ORCID. Examining 92 of the first 100 hits in 10–21 August 2024 with a replicate analysis of those 92 accounts on 29 October 2024, we found that many were likely ‘test’ accounts, possibly by would-be authors or others wishing to test the ORCID registry, or ‘temporary or disposable’ accounts, for possible one-time use only, 55 accounts (60%) were active for just 1–3 days, based on ‘last updated’ dates, while only three ORCID accounts (3%) were associated with papers indexed in Google Scholar or Web of Science. The implications of those ORCID accounts are debated.