Items within your record that have been asserted by one of our member integrators will show the green check mark icon next to the source. This icon is to make it visually clearer to the different types of users that view your public ORCID record which items were added by a trustworthy data source.
ORCID’s foundational commitment to researcher control has proven essential to winning the trust and participation of researchers, which in turn has been largely responsible for the wide uptake and utilization of ORCID by organizations across the globe. However, ORCID is like most other high-traffic sites which allow user-generated content; which can be an attractive target for those creating fake or deceptive records in an attempt to game search engine algorithms or to falsely claim credit for the work of others.
ORCID utilizes a distributed trust model in order to balance the sometimes-competing priorities of researcher control and data quality. Reliable, trustworthy data sources can be connected via authenticated workflows to an ORCID account — with the record holder’s permission — to assert data into an ORCID record. By recording and transparently disclosing the provenance of each and every assertion present in a record, we provide a mechanism for users of ORCID data to judge the veracity and trustworthiness of information in ORCID records for themselves. This mechanism, the recorded and disclosed provenance of assertions, leads to what we call “trust markers.”