"CrossRef is pleased to announce that it will be participating in the recently launched Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative to create an unambiguous identifier for scholarly and professional researchers. Our members will be aware that CrossRef has been exploring the possibility of creating an “author DOI” or “contributor ID” system. In doing so, it has become clear that the issues and use-cases involved in identifying researchers span a broad collection of stakeholders including libraries, institutions, funders, publishers and, of course researchers themselves. In short, this is not primarily “a publisher problem.” As such, we believe that the ORCID approach to creating an inclusive and open organization representing all the stakeholders in the scholarly communications process represents the best chance of creating a successful contributor identification system" - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Absolutely fantastic news on the researcher/contributor ID front! - 'Mummi' Thorisson

For those who are new to the topic, this has has been discussed extensively on FF before and elsewhere. Couple of links which may be helpful for background reading: A specialist OpenID service to provide unique researcher IDs? http://ff.im/GbM8 http://blog.openwetware.org/science... http://network.nature.com/people... - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Finally, it was about time! Good. - Björn Brembs

But of course, D0r0th34! what else could this possibly be about!! !? :) [BTW apologies to fellow FriendFeeders who are not also Tolkien-fans and do not find this amusing at all.. ] - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Mmmkay, so now we have ORCID. Where do I sign up and claim my papers? - Björn Brembs

+1 D0r0th34 Maybe if you're lucky, they'll figure out a way to offload most of the workload to librarians ;-) - Mr. Gunn

+1 Björn, except I'm not so eager to sign up if it means letting people know that I'm an orc. :-) - Ruchira S. Datta