ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is an initiative that seeks to remedy the systemic name ambiguity problems seen in scholarly research by assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output.
In the near future, researchers will be able to link their Scopus ID and Researcher ID to the ORCID profile. I believe by the end of 2013, all major publishers will require authors to link their ORCID profile when submitting papers to a journal.
The editorial in Nature reads,
when scientists and their patrons see the practical benefits of ORCID, it will become the de facto standard author identifier in research, much as the digital object identifier (DOI) has become for papers and data.
