ISNI and ORCID

What is the relationship between ISNI and ORCID?

 ISNI and ORCID are separate organizations that address different aspects of unambiguously identifying people and parties. The background, context and goals of each organization are distinct.

ISNI is an ISO certified global standard for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including writers, artists, creators, performers, researchers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more.  It is part of a family of international standard identifiers that includes identifiers of works, recordings, products and right holders in all repertoires, e.g. DOI, ISAN, ISBN, ISRC, ISSN, ISTC, and ISWC.

A guiding purpose of the ISNI standard is to be a bridge identifier that connects proprietary author identification systems across multiple public databases.  Diffusion of ISNIs is therefore a critical focus and the ISNI-IA is building an initial database of assigned ISNIs which is based on the contributed data of its founding members and diffused back to them.  The assignment system is hosted by OCLC and is based on the Virtual International Authority File.   Coverage of the contributed data is rich in researchers and their associated publications as found in national libraries and in other contributed datasets, such as British Library Theses, ProQuest’s Theses and their Scholar Universe, the UK’s JISC Names Project and member rights management societies of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations.

ORCID was established to solve the problem of correct and accurate attribution of scholarly research output to individual researchers (see the ORCID FAQ - http://www.orcid.org/faq). The ORCID system is based on collaboration amongst publishers, universities, funding bodies and other stakeholders in scholarly communications. ORCID is committed to allowing individual researchers to create, claim, manage and control the privacy of their data or to optionally delegate the management of their data to their university or another third party.

Because ORCID and ISNI have different approaches and serve different communities both organizations are necessary. The organizations will each hold different data, have different privacy and ownership rules for data, have different business models and offer different services. Most importantly of all, ISNI and ORCID will often be identifying the same identities for different communities This will create opportunities for new synergies between different interest groups and a growing interest in interoperation.

ISNI is committed to being interoperable with other identifier schemes, including ORCID. To this end, ORCID and ISNI are coordinating their efforts where they overlap in the research and scholarship communities. ORCID identifiers utilize a format compliant with the ISNI ISO standard. ISNI has reserved a block of identifiers for use by ORCID, so there will be no overlaps in assignments. The organizations are working together to consider additional opportunities for collaboration and interoperation between their assignment systems.

Get Your Unique ISNI

Stand out by applying for the ISNI for your name. The ISNI will uniquely identify your Public Identity as distinct from others who share your name. If your name appears in numerous different ways in your body of work (such as "Michele Smith" or "Michele B. Smith"), the ISNI also provides a way to tie all of these listings together into a single Public Identity.

Registration Agency

A registration agent provides the interface between ISNI applicants and the ISNI Registration Authority, which is governed by the ISNI board and administered by OCLC.

Search the ISNI Database

Use the lookup tool provided by OCLC to search the ISNI database, to discover which Public Identities have already been assigned ISNIs.