To publish an orb in CircleCI, you need to be an owner of the organization. This is because the circleci orb publish command for production versions requires owner-level permissions. This is set by your Version Control System (VCS), such as GitHub. If you are authoring or publishing orbs for a namespace owned by another organization, you may require assistance from your organization admin.

Here is the permissions matrix for Orb CLI commands:

However, there is a workaround to allow non-organization owners to publish an orb. This can be done via a context associated with an organization owner's personal API token. The organization owner will need to generate a personal API token, store the token in a context to be used as an environment variable, and call the environment variable CIRCLE_TOKEN. Using the Orb Development Kit, assign the publishing-context to the newly-created context.