I. Newton, B. Franklin, A. Einstein — in the smaller scientific community of the past, a surname and initial sufficed to identify a researcher and track their contribution to the scientific literature. But the global, mobile community of the twenty-first century is another matter: so many scientists and so many shared surnames are blurring the picture of attribution.

For example, in 2011 there were nearly 4,000 publications authored by Y. Wang — certainly not the same Y. Wang, so how should any one of the Y. Wangs claim proper credit for their own research? Neither is this only a problem for researchers originating from the Far East: a search of Thomson Reuters' Web of Science throws up more than four thousand entries for A. Wright. Which Wright is the right Wright?

Hence the launch of ORCID — the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (www.orcid.org). Every researcher may create, free of charge, a 16-digit machine-readable number as their identifier in the ORCID registry (which is open and non-proprietary), and then link that unique code with their papers or other research output. The result would be a disambiguation of author names, allowing any one author to keep a clear record of their work and, through choice of privacy settings, make that record available to others as they wish.

Nature Publishing Group, to which Nature Physics belongs, is a launch partner of ORCID — one of seventeen, including universities, publishers and funding bodies.

Readers registered on nature.com can now link an ORCID identifier to their nature.com profile; authors submitting to this journal can also link their ORCID identifier to their submission. As further functionality is developed, more features are planned to improve its integration with nature.com and the manuscript-submission system.

We encourage all of our readers and authors to register with ORCID — the benefits of such a registry are plainly contingent on take-up among scientists, as well as on the efforts of publishers and others to incorporate the codes in the process of publishing. It could become a hugely useful Who's Who of science — who really is who.

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