ARDC Persistent Identifier (PID) Portfolio Review

This review was commissioned in 2019 by ARDC’s Director of Data and Services. The remit was to evaluate ARDC’s current persistent identifier (PID) portfolio, and to recommend future business planning and development activities for the component PIDs and services within it.

Research was conducted from September 2019 to February 2020. Landscape analyses were complemented by interviews with ARDC staff and partners, PID providers, and domain experts. While each PID chosen for review was evaluated individually, an agreed set of overarching principles was chosen to ensure consistency and clarity of purpose across the review (See page 13). While the individual review documents were under preparation, regular meetings with the ARDC team helped to shape the structure and context for this synthesis report.

The review includes PIDs for people, organisations, data, physical samples, instruments and projects including ORCID, ROR, DOI, IGSN, Handle and RAiD, among others.

The initial analysis confirmed that PIDs are a key dependency for many ARDC services, and PIDs are adopted and used throughout the research lifecycle. The FAIR data principles are a significant driver for ARDC’s PIDs agenda (and widespread adoption of PIDs more generally).