Identifying NFDI Consortia with Persistent Identifiers

This document presents the official recommendation of the PID4NFDI Coordination Hub for assigning persistent identifiers (PIDs) to the consortia of Germany’s National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).

To ensure consistent, interoperable, and FAIR identification across the NFDI landscape, PID4NFDI recommends the use of DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) with the resource type “Project” as the authoritative identifiers for NFDI consortia.

The proposed approach reflects the specific nature of NFDI consortia as collaborative, project-based alliances without independent legal status, which fall outside the scope of organizational PID systems such as ROR (Research Organization Registry). At the same time this approach avoids potential conflicts or problems with the German revenue administration.

DataCite DOIs offer a mature, transparent, and provenance-controlled infrastructure that aligns with NFDI’s strategic goals for sustainable and machine-actionable metadata management.

Complementary PID systems - including ROR for participating institutions, Wikidata IRIs for semantic integration into the Linked Open Data ecosystem, and RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) for tracking project relationships once operational in Germany - are acknowledged as part of a layered and interoperable PID framework for the future.

By adopting this model for the time being, NFDI strengthens the discoverability, attribution, and long-term accessibility of its research consortia, ensuring their integration within the global PID ecosystem and alignment with international best practices in research infrastructure governance.