Who are ORCID Member Creators?

Today, all ORCID records are created by the individual to whom the record refers. However, until early 2015, we provided an option for ORCID members to create records on behalf of their employees and students, including obtaining an ORCID iD, populating the record with data, and setting the initial visibility and sharing settings. Members who did so are referred to in this article as “Member Creators”. This functionality is no longer provided by ORCID, but there are around 145,000 live records that were created in this way.

To create an ORCID record and assign an ORCID iD on behalf of an individual, the Member  Creator had to represent and warrant to us that they had the authority and the individual’s consent to: provide us with information about the individual; contact them about their record; and distribute certain information in the record to the public. If the Member Creator had the authority to create an ORCID record and have an ORCID iD assigned, but not the individual’s consent to make the data available through the Registry, they were required to set the visibility of the data they connected to records to Only Me. This ensured that the information would not be made publicly available unless the individual changed the visibility and sharing settings.

If a Member Creator created an ORCID record for you, you would have received an email from ORCID inviting you to claim it (to “take over” ownership and management of the record from the Member Creator). If you did not claim your record, the Member Creator could potentially continue to: access any data for which it had set the visibility as Only Me or Trusted; edit and update the record; make privacy selections; name Trusted Organizations; and close the record. If you did not initially claim your record, you can still do so including through a Trusted Individual. Any changes you make to your visibility and sharing settings will override the Member Creator settings.

Records that have not been claimed (meaning, the person affiliated with the Record has taken over its ownership) are not available through the Public Data File. If you object to having an ORCID record that was created for you by a Member Creator, you can either contact ORCID Support at https://orcid.org/help/contact-us and ask us to remove it, or you can claim it and then deactivate the account from your Account Settings page.