Fair Persistent Connections

Over the past year Jisc has led a project examining the role 5 key persistent identifiers (PIDs) can play in the open access landscape. We present an overview of those PIDs along with a discussion of how embedding them within the wider open research workflows will have a positive impact on data and metadata, enabling the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles.

The PIDs are: Works & Data (DOI), People (ORCID), Organisations (ROR), Funding (GrantID), Projects (RAiD)

Ensuring this information is available impacts broadly across data curation and management, particularly:

Addressing inequality: broadening the benefits of data-driven science to more and diverse stakeholders by ensuring that within data and the associated works, the contribution of researchers, their funding, organisations and the narrative of the projects being undertaken are described in a discoverable and reusable way that can be made accessible to global networks through agreed standards.

Persistently identifying this information will protect the integrity of research data – ensuring correct attribution and accountability as well as enabling recognition of more contributions and roles for researchers allowing provenance to be established where lesser-known output is the basis for more established later “keystone” work.

Increasing Effectiveness: By making it easier to share and re-use factual metadata, these PIDs can free up time to generate more value-additive qualitative, narrative and / or contextual information. Machine to machine processes decrease costs – effort, attention and financial