  Archival efforts such as (C)LOCKSS and Portico are in place to ensure the
longevity of traditional scholarly resources like journal articles. At the same
time, researchers are depositing a broad variety of other scholarly artifacts
into emerging online portals that are designed to support web-based
scholarship. These web-native scholarly objects are largely neglected by
current archival practices and hence they become scholarly orphans. We
therefore argue for a novel paradigm that is tailored towards archiving these
scholarly orphans. We are investigating the feasibility of using Open
Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) as a supporting infrastructure for the
process of discovery of web identities and scholarly orphans for active
researchers. We analyze ORCID in terms of coverage of researchers, subjects,
and location and assess the richness of its profiles in terms of web identities
and scholarly artifacts. We find that ORCID currently lacks in all considered
aspects and hence can only be considered in conjunction with other discovery
sources. However, ORCID is growing fast so there is potential that it could
achieve a satisfactory level of coverage and richness in the near future.
