Reflections on the misuses of ORCID iDs

Since 2012, the "Open Researcher and Contributor Identification Initiative" (ORCID) has been successfully running a worldwide registry, with the aim of unequivocally pinpoint researchers and the body of knowledge they contributed to. In practice, ORCID clients, e.g., publishers, repositories, and CRIS systems, make sure their metadata can refer to iDs in the ORCID registry to associate authors and their work unambiguously. However, the ORCID infrastructure still suffers from several "service misuses", which put at risk its very mission and should be therefore identified and tackled. In this paper, we classify and qualitatively document such misuses, occurring from both users (researchers and organisations) of the ORCID registry and the ORCID clients. We conclude providing an outlook and a few recommendations aiming at improving the exploitation of the ORCID infrastructure.