The attribute @assigning-authority may be used to name the organization or system that assigned the identifier or administers the identifier (such as ORCID). Where the authority is adequately covered by naming the identifier type in the @contrib-id-type, this attribute may be omitted.

Upper/lower/mixed case in attribute values for organizations and identifier types is likely to be variable and thus unreliable for search/discovery. If possible, JATS recommends a case-insensitive search for such values. For example, if the contributor identifier is an ORCID, many publishers use “orcid” to keep all attribute values lower case, while others use “ORCID” because that is the native language acronym.

Until JATS version 1.2d2 (2018), the @contrib-id-type’s value conflated two meanings: the attribute could hold the type of identifier (such as an ORCID), or it could hold the name of the organization or system that defined or registered the identifier (such as ORCID). In cases where the two were identical (ORCID, arXiv, and similar) this did not cause a problem. But there was no way to state both that the identifier content of the element was a ScopusID and that the authority was Elsevier.