Add a verified institutional email domain to your record

Introduction

We believe ORCID records have an important role to play in helping uphold the integrity of research since the data in them can be shared widely and re-used within a growing number of scholarly workflows.

Your ORCID record will likely contain “Trust Markers” — items that have been added by one of our member organizations — such as validated affiliations added by universities and research institutions, validated funding awards added by funders, or validated works added by publishers.

These trust markers can help viewers know that your record belongs to someone who is associated with a research organization and that they can be more confident about its contents.

You can add Trust Markers to your own record yourself by simply verifying your institutional email address (via the verified email domain, or the part of the email address after the “@”). This means you can demonstrate your association with your institution in a way that preserves your privacy — no need to share your entire email address with the public!

Ensure you have your institutional email address in your record

Researchers sometimes prefer to use personal email addresses when submitting manuscripts to publishers and applying for grants, so that they can remain contactable even if they leave their current institution. When you add your institutional email address to your ORCID record, publishers and funders who collect your authenticated ORCID iDs in their submission processes can make use of the trust marker associated with the institutional domain. 

1. Log into your ORCID record page
2. Click on the pencil icon on the Emails & domains panel, on the left side of the page

3. In the Email Addresses section, click on Add another email address

4. Add your institutional address, and click Save changes 

5. Check your email inbox for an email with the subject line “[ORCID] Verify your email address.”

6. Click on the Verify your email address button in the email.

Adjust visibility of verified email domains

When you verify a new institutional email address, the domain associated with it will inherit the default visibility setting for the items on your record. Normally, this is set to “Everyone” which is what you want to ensure it is visible in your Record Summary, and in review workflows that your publishers or funders may use. However, you are in control of the visibility of each item in your record so you can change it at any time. To do this:

1. Log into your ORCID record page
2. Click on the pencil icon on the Emails & domains panel, on the left side of the page
3. On the Verified email domains section, click on the visibility box next to the desired email domain
4. Select the desired visibility
5. Click on Save changes

When the “Verified email domains" feature was launched on September 12th, 2024, existing institutional email domains inherited the visibility settings of the email addresses they are derived from, which is usually “Only me”.

*No matter how many Trust Markers your record accumulates over time, it’s ok that you have self-asserted items in your record too! These are marked by the blue “profile” icon. There will always be perfectly good reasons why you may have to self-assert: perhaps the organizations you are associated with don’t contribute data yet, or the organization doesn’t exist in the same form anymore, or you’re recording a historical output.