The reason to use these is that even fullnames are often not unique, which makes it difficult to measure scientific impact. The solution is to assign each author a unique ID somehow and track this between papers.

The question is mostly who controls the system for the IDs. We don't want to this to be in the hands of another greedy company. It needs to be non-commercial and open.

Options:
- ORCID
- ResearcherID (commercially owned)
- ResearchGate?

Should we encourage authors to use ORCID? Mandatory?

Stuff rarely happens with no pushing in the publishing world. ORCID currently has limited use to authors, but potentially great use in AltMetrics where identifying the right author is very important. It is the author-equivalent of a DOI for papers. Thus, it should become more useful in the next few years.

One can take a gamble and try to push to be on top of the change. Of course, if ORCID falters, then we have wasted some time.

Maybe encouraging will do for now.

I thought about the anonymity thing. It seems that one can be anonymous on ORCID. I don't see any actual check on the name.

You are right about keeping low barriers to entry.