How ORCID Handles Privacy and Visibility of Your Record

Updated

ORCID gives you item-by-item control over who can see each piece of your record. Every entry you add — employment, education, funding, works, peer review, and your name variants — carries its own visibility setting, and you can change that setting at any time. The practical consequence: you can keep a public professional profile while hiding specific items, and you can decide which organizations are allowed to write to your record at all. This page explains the visibility levels, how trusted organizations get update access, and what "public" actually means once data leaves ORCID.

The three visibility settings

ORCID applies one of three visibility values to each item in your record:

Setting Who can see it Typical use
Public Anyone, including unauthenticated visitors and third-party systems that read ORCID data Works you want indexed and discoverable
Trusted parties Only organizations you have authorized, plus you Internal identifiers, unpublished affiliations
Only me Only you, when signed in Drafts, items you are still verifying

Two things are worth separating here. The visibility of an item is independent of the visibility of your record as a whole — there is no single "make my profile private" switch that overrides everything. And visibility is not the same as permission to edit: an organization with write access can add or update items, but it cannot see items you have set to "only me."

Who can add or update items in your record

ORCID distinguishes between reading your record and writing to it.

  • Trusted organizations. When you connect an institution, publisher, funder, or repository to your iD, you grant it permission to read and/or update specific sections. You see and approve this authorization, and you can revoke it later from your account settings.
  • You. You can always add, edit, and delete items yourself, and you can change any item's visibility.
  • Everyone else. Other systems can read only the items you have marked public.

A common point of confusion: an organization that has write access can add an item, but you still control whether that item is public, trusted, or private. If you don't want an auto-added affiliation visible, change its visibility rather than disconnecting the organization — though disconnecting is also available if you want to stop future updates.

What "public" means in practice

Public items are readable by anyone and by systems that consume ORCID data, such as publisher submission systems, funder reporting tools, and institutional profile pages. That is usually the point: a public works list lets a journal or repository auto-fill your details and lets your output be attributed to you rather than to a namesake.

The trade-off is that public data can be copied, displayed, and reused by third parties outside ORCID's interface. ORCID does not sell personal data, but it cannot control how a downstream system presents or stores data it has legitimately read. If an item is sensitive — a home address, an unpublished project, an internal grant number — the safer choice is "trusted parties" or "only me."

Deciding what to make public

A workable default for most researchers:

  1. Keep your name, iD, and current affiliation public so collaborators and systems can find and match you.
  2. Keep works public if you want them indexed and auto-filled into submissions.
  3. Set anything you are still verifying, or anything tied to an internal identifier, to trusted parties or only me.
  4. Review the connected organizations list periodically and revoke access you no longer need.

If your goal is discoverability, err toward public. If your goal is a controlled internal record, use the narrower settings and grant write access only to organizations you actually work with.