NWO Persistent Identifier Strategy

Research funding organisations, including NWO, collect a lot of information about research activities, but it is often difficult to re-use this information for strategic decision making. Challenges in collecting good quality, reusable data are multiple and intertwined. They include researchers failing to register their outputs on funders’ systems, as well as name ambiguities of both people and institutions. Together, these information challenges undermine funders’ ability to systematically assess the outcomes of funded research projects and the overall performance of funding instruments.

We propose a persistent identifier strategy to improve NWO’s capacity for analyzing the impact of research funding. The promise of incorporating PIDs into NWO’s information architecture is increased fidelity of research information that leads to long-term improvements in analytical resources with reduced administrative overhead. Increasing the capacity to track research outcomes also enables a feedback loop from which to improve on earlier funding decisions.

NWO works with three fundamental kinds of information that form the basis for most workflows related to funded projects: information about researchers, about organizations, and about grants. Thus we recommend the implementation of three corresponding identifiers into NWO’s information architecture. Implementing these individual PIDs, and making explicit links between them, enables analysis of funded research at many levels of aggregation.

No stakeholder – be it funders, publishers, research performing organisations, or infrastructure providers – is able to cover the entire information spectrum on their own. Given its connecting (‘nexus’) role and ambition, NWO can play a crucial role in promoting the use of PIDs in the wider national and international research landscape by engaging with key stakeholders. We propose participation both nationally and internationally to help shape the PID ecosystem, within which funders are both beneficiaries and enablers of change.

If all the recommendations are adopted, NWO will be entering the PID domain with a cohesive strategy, whereas most other funders are implementing PIDs piecemeal. Such cohesive strategy will help maximise the benefits of implementing PIDs, not just for NWO, but also for other key partners in the national and international landscape. In this sense, the relative delay with which NWO will enter the PID domain can be seen as an advantage, in that it has provided the opportunity to consider PIDs in a more holistic way.