RAiD: the purpose built persistent identifier for projects

Persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as DOI and ORCID, are widely used to unambiguously refer to entities in the research ecosystem, such as publications, grants, datasets, researchers and other contributors, and organisations. PIDs enable qualified references between these entities. These qualified references build a picture of global research called the research or PID graph. This graph can be used by research organisations to automate the collection of information about research. Until now, the existence of the fundamental unit of research - the project - could only be inferred from grants and publications. RAiD (Research Activity Identifier; ISO 23527:2022) is the missing link in the PID graph and was developed by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to uniquely and unambiguously identify projects. RAiD provides a more complete picture of global research. This lightning talk will introduce the problem RAiD was engineered to solve, discuss how RAiD fits into the PID graph, and show how research organisations in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand can access the ARDC RAiD Service.