Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher marking a list of preprints public but a record of an unfunded grant application private.
- Is an instance
An institution receiving a 'trusted parties'-visibility employment date range that is not exposed on the public profile.
- Is an instance
A researcher granting a specific research-office colleague Trusted Individual access to limited-visibility items without changing their public visibility.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A publication being marked 'embargoed' in a repository is a different visibility mechanism, not an ORCID record permission.
- Not an instance
Marking a journal article 'open access' is unrelated to ORCID visibility levels.
Editorial commentary
ORCID’s governing design principle is that the researcher, not any institution or publisher, controls the disclosure of their own record data. Each item on an ORCID record — not just the record as a whole — carries one of three visibility levels: Public (returned through the Public API and shown on the public profile page to anyone), Trusted parties (returned only to organisations or individuals the researcher has explicitly authorised with a scope), or Private (visible only to the iD holder when signed in, never returned by any API call).
Trusted individuals and trusted organisations
A researcher can grant trusted-party access to a specific person — a Trusted Individual, useful for a research-office colleague who needs to see limited-visibility items without the researcher re-entering data elsewhere — or to an organisation that holds Member API credentials, a Trusted Organization, the mechanism publishers, funders and institutions use to read or write limited-visibility items on records that have authorised them. Either grant can be revoked by the researcher at any time from their ORCID account settings.
Default visibility and per-item control
New items generally inherit the account-level default visibility a researcher has set, but every individual item — a single employment record, a single work, a single funding entry — can be adjusted independently afterward, so a researcher can, for example, keep most works public while leaving an unfunded or withdrawn grant application private.
How this differs from the ORCID API’s access tiers
Record permissions are not the same control as the API’s Public/Member tier split. Visibility governs what any caller, regardless of tier, is allowed to see for a given item; the API tier governs what an integration is technically capable of requesting at all. A Member API integration with a valid, researcher-granted scope still cannot retrieve an item the researcher has marked private.
Frequently asked questions
If I mark my employment public, can anyone see it without logging in?
Yes — public items are returned by the Public API and rendered on the ORCID record’s public profile page without any authentication.
Does marking a work ‘public’ on ORCID also make the paper itself open access?
No — ORCID visibility only controls whether the assertion linking the work to the iD is visible; it has no bearing on the access status of the underlying publication, which is governed separately by the publisher or repository.
References
- ORCID Inc., ‘Visibility Settings’ (support.orcid.org).
Also known as
ORCID visibility settings · Public/limited/private (ORCID)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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