Ian Mulvany

May 19, 2025

ORCID Trust Markers

In reading about ORCID trust markers I found the information on the ORCID site to be a little hard to parse, so I sent everything I could find over to Claude and I had Claude create some united documentation for me. 

This is a lay overview of trust markers:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/809826cf-3941-45cf-86b8-dbd38264b2ad

And this is some developer documentation with code examples:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/cde68323-3b59-493f-83f2-4da1dcfe0f51

Now I have not proofed these for accuracy, but reading them helped me reason a bit about how trust markers work. The key thing is that the trust marker can only be applied by an entity that is registered with ORCID to which a person is associated. 

This puts some onus on ORCID as a central agency evaluating the status of entities that can inject trust markers. I think it might be helpful to have some Trust Marker 101 tutorials for common use cases, certainly to have this infrastructure embedded as a turn key feature of the common systems that we use in our industry would be great. I'd love to see some data on what trust markers are the most common, and guidance on what trust markers we should prioritise as publishers. 

About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!