MyCreds, Canada’s national digital credential network, is exploring an integration with ORCID that would let researchers share institutionally verified academic and professional credentials from a MyCreds wallet into their ORCID profiles. The project is in technical scoping, with the two organizations evaluating how to build a consent-based pathway between the credential wallet and the researcher identifier.
MyCreds is national infrastructure owned by the Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada, used by postsecondary institutions to issue and share secure digital academic documents such as transcripts, diplomas, and micro-credentials. ORCID is a nonprofit that assigns persistent digital identifiers to researchers worldwide, used by publishers, universities, and funding bodies to connect a researcher to their body of work. The proposed integration would link the two, so a credential issued and verified by a Canadian institution and held in MyCreds could be carried into the researcher’s ORCID record.
Consent is the operative design principle. Under the model being scoped, a researcher would choose to share specific institutionally verified credentials from their MyCreds wallet into ORCID, rather than the data moving automatically, keeping the holder in control of which verified claims populate their public researcher profile. The result would be an ORCID record enriched with credentials that carry institutional verification behind them, rather than self-asserted entries.
“ORCID aims to allow researchers to showcase the full spectrum of their contributions,” said Chris Shillum, Executive Director of ORCID, situating the verified-credential sharing within the organization’s goal of giving researchers a fuller, trusted profile. The integration would extend the verifiable-credential model, in which a credential is cryptographically tied to its issuer, from the academic-records domain into the researcher-identity domain.
The project has moved through early planning, with a detailed business case presented in late 2025 and potential implementation targeted for this year. The two organizations frame the work as a way to strengthen the international standing of Canadian researchers by making their verified credentials portable into the identifier system that global research infrastructure already relies on.
Sources: Newswire.ca
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
