ORCID iD Mandates Expand to Peer Reviewers and Editors

An ORCID iD, or Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a persistent digital identifier built on 16 digits and expressed as a URL. It connects a researcher to their work, education, funding, and professional affiliations. Author-side mandates arrived years ago at PLOS and a cluster of society journals. Now the same field is appearing in reviewer registration forms and editorial board onboarding at journals that use Clarivate’s ScholarOne and Elsevier’s Editorial Manager.

IOP Publishing and the Royal Society are among the publishers that now require an ORCID iD before a reviewer can be assigned. Some journals ask for it when the account is created. Others block the accept button until the reviewer’s iD is authenticated. Editors, too, are being asked to link their identifiers when they join boards or take on guest-edited special issues.

The reason is less about friendliness and more about fraud. Journal staff have been dealing with fake reviewer accounts, hijacked editor credentials, and guest-edited special issues that turned out to be paper mill operations. A persistent identifier won’t stop all of that, but it gives a journal a stable thread across submission systems, retraction notices, and reviewer records. It also ends the “which J. Smith is this?” problem for researchers with common names.

That thread reaches beyond the manuscript. ORCID iDs embedded in metadata already flow to Crossref, PubMed, funder systems, and institutional repositories. What’s newer is the expectation that reviewers and editors should be part of the same persistent layer as authors. This is where the change stops being cosmetic and starts affecting how journals build their editorial histories.

Here’s the catch

ORCID is not a credential. Anyone can register one in minutes. The identifier proves that a record exists and can be linked across systems; it does not prove that the person behind the record is a real researcher, that the affiliation is current, or that the reviewer is qualified to judge a manuscript. ORCID’s guidance on requiring iDs in publication workflows is clear about this distinction. The identifier should be collected for a defined purpose, and the researcher should control what appears publicly.

That control cuts both ways. A reviewer who receives a mandate may also receive a consent screen asking permission for the publisher to update their ORCID record with peer review activity. Some reviewers grant it without reading. Others find that their previously private review history becomes visible through a service they didn’t remember using. Double-anonymized peer review does not fall apart, because the iD is not shown to authors, but it is visible to the editorial office and the platform.

This is part of the same metadata plumbing that now pushes retraction notices to preprint servers, a shift AcademicJobs covered when Crossref extended retraction metadata. The logic is consistent: stable identifiers make corrections and contributions easier to trace. But tracing an identifier is not the same as auditing a researcher. A journal that requires an ORCID iD gets better bookkeeping, not better judgment.

The administrative burden lands on reviewers, who are not paid for the extra step. Creating an iD, linking an institutional email, setting privacy controls, and granting update permissions adds minutes to an invitation that often arrives at the worst possible time. For reviewers who already have an iD, the requirement is trivial. For those who don’t, it’s one more password to keep before they can do a favour for a journal.

Hype versus reality

Hype says ORCID iD mandates will end fake peer review. Reality says they will make fake accounts easier to spot and harder to reuse, but no identifier can stop an editor from inviting a friend or a paper mill from recruiting willing reviewers. The identifier is infrastructure, not enforcement.

Hype says reviewer contributions will finally be recognised. Reality says recognition depends on whether the journal sends review activity back to the ORCID record and whether anyone reads it. Some publishers do this. Others collect the iD and leave the record empty.

The registry’s public statistics page shows the growth is broad; it doesn’t show that every account is actively maintained. More than 15 million iDs have been issued, but a large share of those records sit dormant. A mandate that creates a new iD is not the same as a mandate that produces a connected, current record. Journals would get more value from helping reviewers merge duplicates and link affiliations than from simply checking a box.

For reviewers, the practical steps are straightforward. Check whether you already have an iD before creating a second one. Link your current institutional email. Set employment and education to the visibility level you can defend. Add peer review activity only through services you trust. Use the same iD on every journal platform.

• Look up your existing ORCID iD before registering a new one.
• Link your current institutional email, not an address that may vanish after a postdoc.
• Set fields to public, trusted parties, or private deliberately.
• Grant publishers permission to update your record only when you understand what they will write.
• Keep one iD. Duplicate iDs defeat the purpose.

The effect on editors is similar but carries extra weight. A guest editor’s ORCID iD now appears in the editorial system’s audit trail. That makes it harder for a disgraced special issue to be blamed on a name that doesn’t exist. It also means an editor who accepts a volume of manuscripts may have that decision history tied to the same identifier across publishers and years. For editors who play by the rules, that’s fine. For anyone counting on obscurity, it’s a problem.

What the mandates don’t do is improve the manuscript. A reviewer with a verified ORCID iD can still submit a late, thin, or unkind report. A journal can have a complete reviewer registry and a broken review process. The identifier solves the narrow problem of knowing who is who in a system with millions of people and hundreds of thousands of venues. It does not solve the broader problem of whether review reports are read, weighted, or rewarded.

Ask a reviewer holding two invitations on a Tuesday night whether an ORCID iD changes her answer. She might say: it ensures the journal knows she already donated twenty reviews this year. Then she still has to decide whether to donate another one. That’s the real test. An identifier can make scholarly labour visible. It can’t make the labour paid, and it can’t make the decision to accept wise.

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