ORCID Inc., a non-profit, international organization, provides persistent and unique identifiers for researchers and started its registry service since October 2012. The number of live ORCID IDs exceeded 1 million shortly after the first ORCID outreach meeting in Asia, held in Tokyo in November 2014; thereafter, ORCID garnered increasing attentions as de facto standard researcher ID, surpassing 1.8 million within a year. This article aims to introduce value positioning of ORCID identifiers and overview ORCID's activities up to 2015. ORCID national and regional consortia, as well as ORCID registry "auto-update" by DOI agencies, have much accelerated the adoption of ORCID internationally, and Japanese institutions are encouraged to follow their suit.
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