In many countries around the world that use authorship and academic papers for career advancement and recognition, the accurate identity of participating authors is vital. ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), an author disambiguation tool that was created in 2012, is being vociferously implemented across a wide swathe of journals, including by many leading publishers. In some countries, authors who publish in indexed journals, particularly in journals that carry a Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Impact Factor, are rewarded, sometimes even monetarily. A strong incentive to cheat and abuse the publication ethos thus exists. There has been a recent spike in the detection of papers apparently derived from paper mills that have multiple issues with figures. The use of such figures across many papers compromises the integrity of the content in all those papers, with widespread ramifications for the integrity of the biomedical literature and of journals that may be gamed by academics. The use of ORCID does not guarantee the authenticity of authors associated with a paper mill-derived paper, nor does it fortify the paper’s integrity. These weaknesses of ORCID may dampen trust in this tool, especially if the ORCID platform is being populated by “ghost” (empty) ORCID accounts of academics whose identities cannot be clearly verified, or disposable accounts (perhaps created by paper mill operators) that are used only once, exclusively to pass the paper submission step. Open-source forensic tools to assist academics, editors and publishers to detect problematic figures, and more stringent measures by ORCID to ensure robust author identity verification, are urgently required to protect themselves, and the wider biomedical literature.

在世界上许多使用作者身份和学术论文来促进职业发展和认可的国家，参与作者的准确身份至关重要。ORCID（开放研究人员和贡献者 ID）是 2012 年创建的一种作者消歧工具，正在大量期刊中大力实施，包括许多领先的出版商。在某些国家/地区，在索引期刊上发表文章的作者，尤其是在带有 Clarivate Analytics 期刊影响因子的期刊上发表文章的作者，会获得奖励，有时甚至是金钱奖励。因此存在欺骗和滥用出版精神的强烈动机。最近检测到的纸张明显来自造纸厂，这些纸张存在多个数字问题。在许多论文中使用这些数字会损害所有这些论文内容的完整性，对生物医学文献和可能被学术界玩弄的期刊的完整性产生广泛的影响。ORCID 的使用并不能保证与造纸厂衍生的论文相关的作者的真实性，也不会加强论文的完整性。ORCID 的这些弱点可能会削弱对该工具的信任，特别是当 ORCID 平台被无法明确验证身份的学者的“幽灵”（空）ORCID 帐户或一次性帐户（可能由造纸厂运营商创建）填充时仅使用一次，专门用于通过论文提交步骤。帮助学者、编辑和出版商检测有问题的数据的开源取证工具，