ORCID — Bitcoin Is Back!

Back in 2021, I noted that ORCID was being exploited by cryptocurrency firms, bitcoin banks, political operatives, porn merchants, and others as these grifters sought to forge illicit links to their sites to boost their SEO.

While purely reportorial, in the strange world where accountability is viewed as attacks, this led to accusations that I was bullying ORCID, which was nonsense. Finding and shedding light on problems is what we should all try to do, and I always appreciate it when people point out my mistakes and missteps.

We all have feet of clay.

So, when a year later it appeared ORCID had addressed the problems, I wrote about that, because fair is fair.

Here we are, two years on, and while many of the initial problems seem to have been addressed, ORCID still has a fake crypto account problem — and other similar problems, detailed below — as these screen grabs show. Some of the accounts date back to 2022.

This one even asserts it has published a paper, but the link is to a document sharing platform’s landing page:

Another search for “food delivery” yields records for food delivery, weed delivery, gift delivery, and many other odd things.

There are also nine entries for “Donald Trump,” none of which seem legit.

• FYI, there is no entry for “Kamala Harris” or “Biden.”

An odd set of records associated with “merch” includes many linking to the United States Merchant Marine Academy, for some unknown reason.

So, ORCID still has a mild case of bad records. They seem to have far fewer problems than they had a few years ago, but the system is clearly still able to be exploited — in ways old and new.