Walden (v2) misattributions/ambiguation of authors?

[Adam Goldberg]

I just noticed that my orcid is associated with an author who is not me, and the works associated with that author seem to be works from at least three different people (judging by field of study, dates, locations).

I've submitted a ticket to OpenAlex, but it's rather concerning that *my* orcid got associated with someone else -- who doesn't even share the same name as me, and my name is 100% correct on orcid (and OpenAlex's forms to fix problems doesn't cover this situation).

Anyone else seeing similar issues?

[Kevin McCurley]

Some publishers collect ORCID without requiring them to be authenticated. There are various reasons for this, including the fact that it can be hard to integrate the authentication into the publisher workflow. If the ORCID is not authenticated (e.g., if a coauthor supplies the ORCID), then mistakes can happen. Crossref has an attribute to indicate whether it was authenticated, but it appears that openalex has no distinction of this type. 

[Euan Adie]

I'm not sure that's a fix either, though gets most of the way there perhaps - the journal is trusted to put correct data into the Crossref record and so can claim to have authenticated the ORCID even if they haven't.

e.g this Crossref record:

https://api.crossref.org/works/10.32885/2220-0975-2023-3-95-106

I did not write or have anything to do with this paper, but "A.M. Nesterov" has my ORCID attached in the Crossref record (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9227-4188) and "authenticated-orcid" is marked as true.

I *think* it's errors / bad journal CMSes rather than the journals themselves being a bad actor but still not great.

Ideally if a user makes a change to their ORCID record then it'd be reflected in Crossref (and then propagate downstream to OpenAlex and any other systems that pull metadata from it).

Best,

Euan

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[Bianca Kramer]

Hi Euan, Kevin, all,

This recent post from the Crossref community forum might help provide some more information, esp. about the status of 'authenticated orcid' in Crossref (confirming Euan's suspicions I think):

https://community.crossref.org/t/authenticated-orcid/14380/2

kind regards, 
Bianca 

Op di 11 nov 2025 om 21:04 schreef Euan Adie <euan...@gmail.com>:

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[Kevin McCurley]

This is pretty clearly a case of malformed data from the publisher. The record should not have been reported to crossref with authenticated-orcid=true. The schema from crossref makes complete sense, but some publishers abuse it. The fact that openalex discards any information about ORCID makes it less useful. The datacite API similarly has no provision for saying whether the ORCID was authenticated. https://datacite-metadata-schema.readthedocs.io/en/4.6/properties/creator/#nameidentifier