WTF is ORCID, you ask? It's something scientific publishing should have had 20 years ago. It's meant to become a system that disambiguates authorship and attributions. For instance, go to PubMed and search for author 'J. Smith', and you will find out that this person has authored 17435 papers. Obviously, it is almost impossible to find or follow authors with common names. 'Open Researcher and Contributor ID', ORCID is one of the initiatives that are trying to solve this problem.

Today, ORCID announced that they are launching a non-profit organization, "dedicated to solving the name ambiguity problem in the scholarly research community". Given the backing of this organization by a large number of significant players in the field, from publishers such as Elsevier or NPG, to other non-profits such as CrossRef all the way to Thomson-Reuters of IF-infamy, I'm optimistic as to the potential of this long overdue initiative.

It is good to hear that Martin Fenner is on the board of the new non-profit, as I know him personally and think very highly of him. At least one competent and enthusiastic member on that board This makes me even more optimistic that something finally will come out of this that solves this problem that has become somewhat of an embarrassment: the supposedly most advanced segment of modern society (scientists) cannot figure out a way to disambiguate the names of its contributors!