This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scientific literature or publications can be hard to recognize as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems.

[2] ORCID aims to provide a persistent code for researchers,[3] to address the problem that a particular author's contributions to scholarly communication can be hard to recognize as most personal names are not unique and thus multiple persons of the same name could contribute to the same scholarly field, even from the same institutional department.

[5] The "Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative"—hence the name ORCID—was created temporarily prior to incorporation.

[8] ORCID, Inc. was incorporated as an independent nonprofit organization in August 2010 in Delaware, United States of America, with an international board of directors.

"[20][21] In a 2021 update to the Springer Nature website, they noted that they would thenceforth "support verifying and crediting your [peer] review activity directly from our manuscript submission systems to ORCID.

[27] The final character, which may also be a letter "X" representing the value "10" (for example, Stephen Hawking's ORCID is https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9079-593X[33]), is a MOD 11-2 check digit conforming to the ISO/IEC 7064:2003 standard.

[38] Grant-making bodies such as the Wellcome Trust (a charitable foundation) have also begun to mandate that applicants for funding provide an ORCID identifier.

[39] In several countries, consortia, including government bodies as partners, are operating at a national level to implement ORCID.