Dear Sir,

There are several pertinent and valid points raised by Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva with regard to our original publication on ORCID ID for the surgeons [1]. Though there are few loopholes in the ORCID data as mentioned by Teixeira da Silva, it must be appreciated that this probably is the first effort to link all the research publications together and make a registry of the researcher giving the freedom to the author to control the visibility of each publication and making the visibility public to increase the discoverability of the author no matter how remote or obscure he is located!

As per the principles of ORCID, researchers will be able to create, edit and maintain an ORCID identifier and record free of charge and they will control the defined privacy settings of their own ORCID record data. In a nutshell, just like USA’s Social Security Number or India’s Aadhaar Card for the citizens, ORCID is a unique 16-digit identifier linking the author’s research publication with his personal email. So in essence, ORCID offers tools for storing and managing data in the ORCID Registry.

ORCID does not edit or curate data and that is the absolute responsibility of individual researcher. In case of fake or fabricated research on ORCID, it is referred to ORCID Ombudsperson for dispute resolution.

In case of few loopholes as suggested by Teixeira da Silva, it is very important for the ORCID to take concrete and bold steps to avoid fake ORCID, over-identified users, over loaded or under loaded ORCID ID, non-existent ORCID and wrongly attributed ORCID. The very fact that ORCID ID has grown from 50,000 users in 2012 to more than 9.7 million today, and it is becoming an essential part in the research and scholarly publication and every researcher are able to understand the sheer importance of having an ORCID ID.

Last but not the least, every strict regulation or gate keeping for ORCID to plug the loopholes as suggested by Teixeira da Silva will need money and since ORCID ID is still being offered free of cost to the researchers, there will be few teething problems for few more days before the system gets regularised, organised and fully clean. My suggestion to avoid the fake ORCID ID is to link every research on ORCID ID with the PubMed ID or Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the manuscript to avoid any type of duplication or fraud in ORCID. Any ORCID ID application with incomplete or insufficient professional details should not be entertained till its complete and wholesome. Any ORCID ID which is not getting updated or being non-operational for a year should be locked or deleted. It should be mandatory for all to have a public viewing of ORCID ID and no account should be entertained as private on logging to the ORCID online.

As the Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho and his brother were detained in Paraguay while trying to enter the country with fake Paraguayan passports even in the year 2020 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51778788), we must wait a bit more to make ORCID ID more original, authentic and clean just like we believe the passports are!