ORCID peer review: how a conference registers the reviewer's work

A researcher who reviews three papers for a conference spends, conservatively, a working day on it. The conference gets a better program. The authors get a better paper. The reviewer gets an email of thanks, and sometimes a line in the proceedings front matter that nobody indexes. ORCID has had a place for that work since 2015, and it is the only part of the record the researcher cannot fill in alone: the organization that convened the review has to register it. This guide explains what that entry is, how a conference creates it, and what each side has to do.

What is the peer review section of an ORCID record?

An ORCID record has sections for works, funding, affiliations and, since 2015, for peer review. The peer review section records “review and service activity”: the fact that a researcher reviewed or evaluated something for an organization, on a given date, in a given role.³ Each item in it is a verified statement made by the organization that convened the review, not a self-declaration.

That distinction is the whole point. In ORCID’s own words, “the Peer Review section can only be populated by an ORCID member organization, not by users.”¹ A researcher can delete an entry or change who sees it, but cannot create one. So an entry that reads “reviewer, review, [the conference], 2026” carries the same weight as a work deposited by a publisher: someone with a membership, credentials and accountability asserted it.

The section was designed with journals in mind, and most of the entries in it today come from publishers. Nothing in the specification restricts it to journals. ORCID lists the convening organization as “a journal publisher, conference organizer, funding agency, faculty, etc.”¹ and accepts conference papers among the subject types. The gap is not in the standard. It is in the conference platforms, which mostly never built the integration.

Why do reviewers of conference papers rarely get credit?

Because the credit has nowhere to go. A journal reviewer at least has the journal’s name, an ISSN and a publisher with an ORCID integration behind it. A conference reviewer works for a scientific committee that changes every edition, on a platform chosen by that committee, and the review ends when the decision letter goes out.

The scale of the unrecorded work is not small. An estimate built from public data puts the time reviewers worldwide spent on journal peer review in 2020 at over 100 million hours, and values the time of US-based reviewers alone at over USD 1.5 billion for that year.⁴ Those figures cover journals only, because journals are where the data exist; conference review, by construction, is missing from the count. Within the journal system the burden is also concentrated: a modeling study of biomedical peer review found that 20% of researchers performed between 69% and 94% of all reviews.⁵ Conferences draw from the same small pool of people who say yes.

Reviewers themselves have been clear about what they want. In a Wiley survey of nearly 3,000 researchers, respondents “strongly believe that reviewing is inadequately acknowledged at present and should carry more weight in their institutions’ evaluation process,” and they valued recognition initiatives above monetary rewards.⁶ A review of reward mechanisms reached the same conclusion from the publisher’s side: reviewer credits, “properly counted and displayed on individual digital profiles, help distinguish the best contributors, invite them to review and offer responsible editorial posts.”⁷

The design of the recognition matters, though. A natural experiment with 1,865 scientists tested the common practice of publishing reviewer names in a yearly issue and found that making the reward contingent on a performance judgment strongly reduced the number of people willing to review, by about 60% compared with no reward at all.⁸ A record that simply states what was done, when and for whom, with no ranking attached, avoids that trap. That is what the ORCID entry is.

How does a conference register a review in the reviewer’s ORCID?

The mechanism is an API call from an ORCID member organization to the reviewer’s record, made with the reviewer’s permission. ORCID documents it as a four-step workflow.¹

1. The reviewer provides their ORCID iD by signing in. During the review process, the reviewer is asked to sign in to their ORCID record, or to register one. This is authentication, not a text field where someone types sixteen digits: the iD is confirmed by ORCID itself, so there is no “J. Smith” to disambiguate later.
2. The reviewer authorizes the convening organization. ORCID asks the reviewer “to authorize (or deny) access for the convening organization to read and update their record.” Technically this is an OAuth token with the /activities/update scope.² From the reviewer’s side, the organization then appears among the trusted organizations of their ORCID account, and the permission can be revoked there at any time.
3. The review is completed. Nothing is written to ORCID while the review is in progress.
4. The convening organization adds the item. Once the review is done, the organization, or the platform acting for it, posts a peer review item to the reviewer’s record. The item lands in the peer review section with the organization named as its source.

Two details matter for conferences specifically. The first is the review group ID, which is how ORCID aggregates reviews on the record. The default is an ISSN, and ORCID’s tutorial says the group ID “should usually be a valid ISSN”; a proceedings series that carries one can use it directly. For anything else, the member organization creates a peer review group first, using one of the identifier types ORCID supports, which include orcid-generated alongside issn, fundref, publons and ringgold.² So a conference without an ISSN is not blocked; it needs a group of its own before the first review is posted.

The second is the review identifier. Every item must carry at least one identifier that refers to the review itself, not to the paper reviewed, and ORCID checks it “to prevent double counting of review activity.”² When no persistent identifier exists, the source generates a local one. This is what makes it safe to register hundreds of reviews from one conference without inflating anyone’s record.

This is the path Galoa runs for the scientific conferences on its platform. As an ORCID Institutional Member since 2025, Galoa registers the review activity into the reviewer’s own ORCID record, in any review format the committee chooses, blind or open. It started with selected events and today the qualification of which reviews are eligible is automatic, so the organizer does not decide case by case.

What does the ORCID entry show, and what stays private?

An ORCID peer review item has a short, fixed set of fields.² Some describe the reviewer, some the review, some the organization. Only one group is optional: the fields that describe the subject of the review. The table below separates what an entry can carry from what never leaves the conference platform.

The line that protects anonymity is ORCID’s own guidance on the review identifier: “Unless the review is openly available, we recommend that this does not contain identifiable data that can be traced back to the subject of the review.”¹ The same logic applies to the optional subject fields. A conference running blind review leaves them empty, and the entry says, in effect, “this person reviewed for this conference in this year,” which is exactly the amount of information a CV line would carry.

The reviewer also controls who sees it. Like every activity on an ORCID record, a peer review item has a visibility setting: everyone, trusted parties only, or only the researcher.³ The organization asserts the item; the reviewer decides how public it is.

Does it work with double blind peer review?

Yes, and this is the question that stops most committees. The concern is reasonable: double blind depends on the reviewer’s identity staying hidden from the author, and here is a process that writes the reviewer’s name and the conference’s name into a public registry.

What resolves it is what the entry does not contain. It does not name the paper, the authors or the outcome. An author who looks up a reviewer’s ORCID record learns that the reviewer took part in the conference’s review, along with dozens or hundreds of other people who did the same. That was never a secret; program committees are published. The mapping between reviewer and paper is the secret, and it stays on the platform.

Timing helps as well. The item is posted after the review is completed, and the date field accepts a year or a year-month, so the entry does not have to expose the exact day a report was submitted.

In open review the calculus changes in the other direction: the committee may choose to fill the subject fields with the paper’s title and, once the paper is published in the proceedings, its DOI. Then the reviewer’s ORCID entry links to a specific, citable work. That is the version of reviewer credit the open review literature has been asking for, and a Crossref DOI on the proceedings is what makes the link resolvable.⁹

What does the organizer need to do?

The organizer does not write to ORCID. The platform does, under the organizer’s name. What the organizer has to secure is the set of conditions that make the write possible.

• Run the review on a platform that is an ORCID member, or is operated by one. Membership is what grants access to the member API. A platform that only lets reviewers paste an ORCID iD into a profile field cannot register anything.
• Make ORCID sign-in part of the reviewer’s onboarding. The reviewer’s authorization is collected at sign-in, with the permission to update the record. If the platform collects the iD without the permission, the write will fail later.
• Decide the review group. If the proceedings carry an ISSN, that is the group. If not, the member organization creates a group for the conference or the series before the first review is posted.
• Define what “completed” means. ORCID needs a completion date and receives the item after the fact. A committee that closes the review round on a fixed date gives the platform a clean trigger.
• Decide the subject policy. Blind review: subject fields empty. Open review: subject fields with title and DOI once the proceedings are published.
• Tell reviewers in the invitation. “Your review will be registered in your ORCID record” is a recruitment argument, and committees that use it have one more reason for a busy researcher to say yes.

None of this requires the organizer to handle credentials or API calls. It requires the organizer to choose a platform that does, and to ask that platform two questions: which ORCID member writes the item, and under what group ID.

What does the reviewer need to do?

Less, but not nothing.

• Have an ORCID iD. Registration is free and takes minutes at orcid.org.
• Sign in with it when joining the review process, rather than typing the iD into a form. Signing in is what proves the iD is yours.
• Grant the permission when asked. ORCID shows a consent screen listing what the organization is asking for. The permission to add or update your research activities is the one that allows the review to be registered; reading your record is what lets the platform confirm the iD.
• Check the record after the review round closes. The item appears under Peer review, grouped by the conference or proceedings, with the organization as source. If the group name is wrong or the item is missing, the organization can update or repost it; you can only delete.
• Set the visibility you want. New entries inherit your default visibility preference. Choose Everyone if you want the credit visible on your public profile. Choose Trusted parties to share it only with parties you have authorized to read limited-access information, or Only me to keep it private.

The permission can be revoked at any time from the “Trusted organizations” list in the ORCID account, and revoking it does not remove entries already posted.

The reviewer keeps the record

A conference lasts a week. A scientific committee lasts an edition. The reviewer’s ORCID record lasts as long as the reviewer’s career, and it moves with them across institutions, countries and funders. Registering conference review there is the difference between “I have reviewed for several conferences” on a CV and a verified list that a hiring committee or a funder can check.

If your conference runs its call for papers and peer review on Galoa, the registration is part of the conference platform, together with the proceedings published with Crossref DOIs. If it runs elsewhere, the two questions above are still the ones to ask.