ORCID was first organized as the "Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative". A prototype was developed on software adapted from that used by Thomson Reuters for its ResearcherID system. The registry is now an independent nonprofit organization, ORCID, Inc., incorporated in August 2010. Its executive Director, Laure Haak, was appointed in April 2012. ORCID is freely usable and interoperable with other ID systems. ORCID launched its registry services and started issuing user identifiers on 16 अक्टूबर 2012. Formally, ORCID IDs are specified as URIs, for example, the ORCID for John Wilbanks is <nowiki>http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4510-0385</nowiki>. However, some publishers use the short form, e.g. "ORCID: 0000-0002-4510-0385".

ORCID is a subset of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (as ISO 27729) and the two organizations are cooperating. ISNI will uniquely identify contributors to books, television programmes, and newspapers, and has reserved a block of identifiers for use by ORCID, in the range 0000-0001-5000-0007 to 0000-0003-5000-0001. It is therefore possible for a person to legitimately have both an ISNI and an ORCID - effectively, two ISNIs.

Both ORCID and ISNI use 16-character identifiers, using the digits 0-9, and separated into groups of four by hyphens. The final character, which may also be a letter "X" representing the value "10" (for example, Nick Jennings' ORCID is <nowiki>http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0166-248X</nowiki>), is a MOD 11-2 check digit conforming to the ISO/IEC 7064:2003 standard.

An ORCID account for a fictitious person, Josiah Carberry, exists as <nowiki>http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097</nowiki>, for use in testing and training examples.

Development and launch
Integrations
Uses
Members, sponsors and registrants