ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) has now launched.
The ORCID project aims to solve the problem of attributing scholarly works to the correct authors. This can be troublesome particularly in cases where many authors have the same name (eg. John Smith) or when an author has changed their name, or published under variations of their name (eg. Mary Williamson, Mary P. Williamson, M. Williamson-Brown).
ORCID creates one unique identifier, to which an academic can then link all of their scholarly publications. It is early days for ORCID and judging by the feedback/information on their website, further enhancements and features are under development. However the initiative has the support of Web of Knowledge (Thomson Reuters), Scopus (Elsevier), and several major academic publishers, such as Cambridge University Press, Sage, and Taylor & Francis, so it looks well placed to become an authoritative identifier for academic works.
Registering is extremely quick (you can do it here), and from there you can start to add your own information.
Click 'Import Research Activities' on the left to associate your ORCID ID with your Scopus ID, and import your publications from Scopus.
You can then click to Update your Works, and add your publications from a variety of sources.
As I mentioned it looks like many features are still in the planning stages (such as importing from Google Scholar). I've only played around with it at a very surface level, but if I can offer any assistance please get in touch. It does look like quite a promising way of ensuring that publications (and citations) are correctly attributed to the correct author, and of providing authoritative lists of a scholar's publications.
