ORCID provides a permanent digital identifier that is unique to you. With this identifier, you can distinguish yourself from other researchers.
The ORCID initiative is open, non-profit, and community driven. It is also backed by large publishers such as Thomson Reuters and Elsevier, which means that the ORCID identifier can be connected with commercial products like ResearcherID and Scopus.
ORCID FAQ Page
With countless scholars busy in thousands of institutions across the world, many who publish face the challenge of distinguishing their work from that of others with similar names (most of these guys, for example, are not me).
The ORCID identifier is intended to solve this problem by providing a unique identifier for every researcher. Apart from being used for author disambiguation, it is increasingly being used in research workflows such as manuscript and grant submissions. This saves you from having to enter the same data repeatedly when submitting your work.
You can get an ORCID identifier free of charge at the ORCID website.
