PIDs – what are they, and why are they important?

Vicky Wallace is a Research Skills Advisor in the Research Skills Team, Library Services, and in this post she demystifies persistent identifiers (PIDs), their role in research and why you should care. You too can become a PID person!

At a basic level, a PID is a persistent identifier – persistent (in that they are fixed, unchanging), and an identifier (a unique string of characters).  For all PIDs, their persistence is maintained due to the governance of, and between, the PID granting organisations. 

You are probably already aware of, and utilising, two important PIDs:

• DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers, are persistent identifiers designed specifically for research outputs.  They enable accurate data citation, making it easier for people to locate, cite, link, assess and re-use a digital object.  DOIs are well established in the community.
• ORCID is the Open Research Contributor ID.  It consists of a 16-digit code that a researcher keeps throughout their career, enabling effective author disambiguation.  ORCID has been adopted by the scholarly community, with over 10 million members from over 1000 member institutions in 44 countries.  ORCID is mentioned in UKRI’s Open Access Policy.

Whilst PIDs as single entities are useful in the role of access and disambiguation, they also provide the opportunity to link systems together.  This provides three key benefits for research:

• Reducing research bureaucracy
• Increasing efficiency for researchers and others in the research landscape
• Enabling open research

At a recent OASPA/JISC webinar Catriona MacCallum, Director of Open Science at Hindawi, summarised the benefits for researchers individually, including the following:

1. Enables search and discovery, linking the article to other research outputs, researchers and organisations
2. Helps provide persistent provenance and credit for researchers
3. Makes research on research easier
4. Helps with research evaluation
5. Helps make publications, and publishing, more trustworthy
6. Provides a basis for development of new tools and services
7. Enables more efficient tracking and reporting of costs and pricing for publishing services in line with funder/institutional policies
8. Reduces manual labour in the workflows – from comms to credit
9. Reduces the administrative burden for researchers
10. Greater marketing tools and more intelligence
11. Makes science communication more cost-effective and efficient

JISC, in collaboration with the Morebrains Cooperative, are leading a range of relevant work-packages to break down the barriers to widespread PID adoption.  This includes establishing five priority PIDs to maximise the potential for different systems to interoperate:

• People (ORCIDs)
• Outputs (DOIs – Digital Object Identifiers from Crossref and DataCite)
• Grants (Crossref Grant IDs)
• Organisations (Research Organization Registry’s RORs)
• Projects (RAiDs)

Widespread adoption of these priority PIDs would be hugely beneficial for all involved in the research ecosystem.  See Morebrains’ PIDcycle for more information on how and when PIDs come into play, streamlining processes.

To contribute to the PID movement, “become a PID person”.  Meadows et al’s 2021 PIDs 101 presentation suggested four steps to achieving this:

1. get and use PIDs
2. tell your PIDs about your other PIDs
3. share your PIDs with the community
4. join the PID forum

Browse related training opportunities from the Research Skills Team in the Library to get started!