The Membership and service section of your ORCID record is for information about your membership affiliation with an organization and your activities in service of an organization. You can add information about your memberships or service you have performed to your ORCID record manually, and we also strongly encourage you to grant trusted organizations and trusted individuals permission to add and edit information about your affiliation with them.

1. Introduction
2. Add or edit a membership or service manually
1. Fields in a membership or service affiliation
2. Help, my organization is not in the list!
3. Delete a membership or service

Introduction

Membership and Service are types of affiliations on the ORCID record. They describe your membership in an organization, or your donation of time or other resources in the service of an organization. Each affiliation includes the organization’s name and location, the date the affiliation started, and who added the information to your record: you, or a trusted organization.

We strongly encourage you to allow trusted organizations to add and update your employment affiliations with them on your ORCID record. They will then appear as the source of the information, enabling you and others to be confident that it is authoritative and trustworthy. As ORCID members, trusted organizations are also required to ensure that the information they add is in a format that can be easily shared with other organizations, saving you time when completing forms.

Not sure what affiliation type is right for you? Contact us -- we’re happy to provide more information!

Membership

Choose Membership when you are a member of a society or association (regardless of whether you pay for your membership). This subtype does not include honorary memberships and fellowships, which should be listed under Invited positions and Distinctions.

Examples of membership include:

• Member of an association or society
• Member of a trade or industry body

Service

Choose Service for significant donations of your time, money, or other resources to an organization or community. This can also include voluntary work.

Examples of service include:

• Volunteer society officer
• Elected board position
• Standards body member
• Expert panel member
• Editorial board member
• Review editor
• Study group member
• Conference organizer
• Conference panel chair
• Committee work
• Project work
• Extension work

Add and edit membership or service affiliation information manually

To add a new membership or service affiliation, sign into your ORCID record, scroll to the Membership and service section and click on +Add. Select then Add membership or Add service on the dropdown menu.

In the pop-up, enter the name of the organization in the organization field. As you type it in, our system will automatically suggest options from a pre-populated list. Each organization is associated with one or more organization identifiers; and our system automatically returns the most common version of the organization’s name associated with the most common identifier in our system.

Select an option from this list whenever possible, because it will help improve the accuracy of data on your record, for example when searching ORCID by organization, or when other systems read your ORCID record to add information to their system -- such as when you are submitting a manuscript or applying for a grant.

If the name in the pre-populated list is not up to date, or not in the language that you prefer to use on your ORCID record, select the name from the list and then edit the Display organization field to update how the name will appear in your record.

You can edit a membership or service affiliation that you, or a trusted individual has added by clicking the edit (pencil) icon at the bottom of each affiliation. Note that affiliations added by trusted organizations can not be edited, however, you can change the visibility settings.

Fields in a membership or service affiliation

The fields in a membership affiliation are separated in three sections:

Organization

• Organization (required): The organization you are or were affiliated with
  
  Note: While some organization names include department level listings, we strongly recommend that you pick the highest level of the organization and provide departmental information in the department field.
  
• City (required): City where the organization is located. This field is usually automatically filled in when you select an organization
  
  
• Region, State or County: The state/region of the organization
  
  
• Country (required): The country or territory of the organization. This field is usually automatically filled in when you select an organization
  
  

Membership Details

• Department: The subsection, field, or department related to the affiliation. For a membership affiliation, this could be the chapter or section of your association that you belong to (if applicable)
• Membership Type: The type of membership, e.g. Student member. Be sure to include a descriptive title!
• Start date: The start date of your relationship with the organization. For example, the date that you started your term as a board member. It is strongly encouraged to add at least a year to your membership or service affiliation to increase veracity.
• End date: The end date of your relationship with the organization. For example, the date that your society membership lapsed. If you are still involved with the organization, you do not need to supply an end date.
• Link: A website URL related to your membership in the organization.

Visibility

You can learn more about each type of visibility setting on Visibility settings.

The fields in a service affiliation are also separated in three sections:

Organization

• Organization (required): The organization you are or were affiliated with
  
  Note: While some organization names include department level listings, we strongly recommend that you pick the highest level of the organization and provide departmental information in the department field.
  
• City (required): City where the organization is located. This field is usually automatically filled in when you select an organization
  
  
• Region, State or County: The state/region of the organization
  
  
• Country (required): The country or territory of the organization. This field is usually automatically filled in when you select an organization
  
  

Service details

• Department: The subsection, field, or department related to the affiliation. For a service affiliation, this could be a panel, project, working group, journal, or other
  
  
• Role/title: The title of the role or description of the service, e.g. Facilitator, Review Editor. Be sure to include a descriptive title!
  
• Start date: The start date of your relationship with the organization. For example, the date that you started your term as a board member. It is strongly encouraged to add at least a year to your service affiliation to increase veracity
  
  
• End date: The end date of your relationship with the organization, for example, when you rotated off a Board or panel. If you are still involved with the organization, you do not need to supply an end date
  
• Link: A website URL related to your service to the organization

Visibility

You can learn more about each type of visibility setting on Visibility settings.

Help, my organization is not in the list!

Don’t see your organization listed? Don’t worry, it may still be there! You can try entering your organization’s name in another language, as the sources of our organization list may have used the original name or translated name in their listing.

Please note that ORCID does not maintain the list of organizations available to be selected. This list is sourced from the databases in Ringgold, ROR, or Crossref, since they provide unique identifiers to these organizations. If you cannot find your organization's name, please reach out to your institution responsible for contacting these organizations. We regularly update the list of organizations in ORCID based on information from these three databases.

In the meantime, you can manually type in your organization name without selecting from the type-ahead.

Delete a membership or service affiliation

You can delete any affiliation on your ORCID record by signing into your personal ORCID record and selecting the delete icon (trash bin) on the lower right side of the affiliation.

We do not recommend deleting affiliations added by trusted organization. Having affiliations added by trusted organizations allow you to share accurate and authoritative information with other institutions and systems. If the affiliation is added incorrect or out of date, please let us know! We will get in touch with the organization and ask for their help updating your affiliation.