Persistent identifiers (PIDs) uniquely identify researchers, organizations, and research outputs. PIDs allow these entities to be connected and provide stable references for citations. They offer advantages like clear and stable identities that allow humans and machines to accurately refer to data over many years. PIDs are the "plumbing" of open research as they enable findings and contributions to be traced, reused, and properly attributed. Funders are increasingly mandating the use of PIDs like ORCID to support open access policies and more transparent research evaluation. PIDs thus help enable open research and responsible, metrics-based evaluation of that research.

1. The role of persistent identifiers in open research
James Wilsdon, RoRI & University of Sheffield
j.wilsdon@sheffield.ac.uk; @jameswilsdon
http://www.researchonresearch.org/

2. What I’ll try to cover in 10 minutes:
What are PIDs?
Why do they matter?
How do they support open research
& responsible evaluation?

3. What are PIDs?
“Persistent identifiers (PIDs) – for people (researchers), places (their organizations) and things (their
research outputs and other contributions) – are foundational elements in the overall research
information infrastructure. They enable these entities to be uniquely identified and connected, to
create reliable links between them.”
Meadows, Alice, Laurel L. Haak, and Josh Brown. 2019. “Persistent Identifiers: The Building Blocks of the Research Information
Infrastructure”. Insights 32 (1): 9. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.457
“Using PIDs offers thus a number of great advantages such as clear and stable identities allowing
humans and machines to exactly refer to the right data even after many years, to have easy ways to
prove identity, integrity, and authenticity, to provide stable references also as basis for citations, to
easily find descriptive metadata, and information needed for authorization, for reuse tracing
information, on versioning, etc.”
Wittenburg, P. “From Persistent Identifiers to Digital Objects to Make Data Science More Efficient” Data Intelligence 2019 1:1, p6. Available
online at: https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00004

5. PIDs as the ‘plumbing’ of open research

6. Growing emphasis on PIDs in research systems

7. Growing emphasis on PIDs in research systems
Jisc to lead on selecting and promoting a range of
unique identifiers, including ORCID, in
collaboration with sector leaders with relevant
partner organisations. Open access to research
publications - 2018 4 Funders of research to
consider mandating the use of an agreed range
of unique identifiers as a condition of grant.
(Recommendation 8)

8. Growing emphasis on PIDs in research systems (EU level)

9. How PIDs support open research & open
evaluation?

10. How PIDs support open research & open evaluation?

12. http://researchonresearch.org
j.wilsdon@sheffield.ac.uk
@RoRInstitute