The aim of ORCID is to aid "the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature". Another suggested use is to provide each researcher with "a constantly updated ‘digital curriculum vitae’ providing a picture of his or her contributions to science going far beyond the simple publication list." The idea is that other organizations will use the open-access ORCID database to build their own services.

It has been noted in an editorial in "Nature" that ORCID, in addition to tagging the contributions that scientists make to papers, "could also be assigned to data sets they helped to generate, comments on their colleagues’ blog posts or unpublished draft papers, edits of Wikipedia entries and much else besides".

In April 2014, ORCID announced plans to work with the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information to record and acknowledge contributions to peer review.

Uses
Development and launch
Members, sponsors and registrants
Integrations