ARDC and DataCite Announce Partnership to Deliver the RAiD Service

ARDC and DataCite are pleased to announce a strategic partnership to deliver RAiD, a service and system to identify and track research projects and activities. The DataCite-ARDC partnership is a pivotal step in providing a fast, robust, high quality and reliable RAiD service for researchers that will be sustained over the long term. 

The announcement is made in the context of the recently launched Australian National Persistent Identifiers (PID) Strategy. RAiD is one the 5 ‘priority PIDs’ listed in the 2022 report Incentives to Invest in Identifiers, which was a foundational, evidence-based report informing the development of the Strategy.

DataCite is a community-led organisation with a vision to connect research and advance knowledge. ARDC is Australia’s leading research data infrastructure facility and is the Australian DataCite Consortium Lead. RAiD is an ISO standard (23527) with ARDC as the global RAiD ISO Registration Authority. RAiD is expanding internationally and later this year will be incorporated into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

“The partnership between RAiD and DataCite offers several benefits”, said Matt Buys, Executive Director of DataCite. “DataCite’s infrastructure ensures scalability, cost-efficiency for individual RAiD Registration Agencies, alignment with RAiD’s aspirations, simplified integration into the PID ecosystem, and a straightforward transition for existing projects with DataCite DOIs to become RAiDs.”

Natasha Simons, ARDC Director, National Coordination said that the ARDC-DataCite partnership is an exciting development for the RAiD service. “RAiD enables researchers to keep track of how each project is evolving and the outputs they produce. With DataCite providing foundational DOI infrastructure, researchers can be confident that the RAiD service is trustworthy, reliable and available well into the future.”

What Problem is RAiD Solving?

RAiD is designed to address a key challenge faced by researchers, research administrators, funders, publishers, and others in the research ecosystem—maintaining consistent and up-to-date information on projects throughout the research lifecycle. 

Unlike a grant, which a researcher receives, a project is something that a researcher does. Project information is also dynamic; what is planned is not necessarily what is delivered, while project contributors and organisations may change over time. 

Similar to a container with a label, RAiD provides a unique, persistent identifier (a DataCite DOI) for each research project. As the project evolves, information about project personnel, organisations, inputs, and outputs is added to the RAiD container, producing a project and capturing information about relationships between resourcing and outcomes. RAiD thus provides a single place for storing and retrieving project information for long-term discovery, resolution, access, sharing, reporting and other uses by the global research community. 

RAiD is a trailblazer service, and through the partnership with DataCite, RAiD is now enabled by world class DOI infrastructure.

Benefits of the Partnership Between DataCite and RAiD

The partnership between RAiD and DataCite offers several benefits, including standardised landing pages in line with RAiD’s existing setup, support for unique identifier structures using “10.XXXXX” prefixes, and the option for RAiD to participate in DOI-related policies via ARDC as a DOI Foundation General Member. 

How Does it Work?

RAiDs are issued by RAiD Registration Agencies (RAs) appointed by ARDC (as the ISO RAiD Registration Authority). Each RAiD RA operates an instance of the RAiD service for a particular region or constituency. RAiD RAs will use DataCite services to register DOIs as RAiD identifiers, and submit a subset of RAiD metadata to DataCite. The full metadata record, tailored to the requirements of research project tracking, is stored in the RAiD service. Individual RAiD services are then federated into the global RAiD system. 

This architecture will not only yield a robust and scalable global system, but will produce a seamless experience for RAiD users. RAiDs are expressed in the form of  https://raid.org/prefix/suffix, resolvable through the RAiD portal operated by the ARDC at https://raid.org/ – though they may still be resolved through any DOI or handle resolver.

Common Purpose and Next Steps

The DataCite-RAiD partnership will be guided by a joint steering group focused on enabling findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable research globally through open identification and description of research activities. This collaboration marks an important step toward empowering the international research community to more effectively track and build upon their work over time. If you are interested in using RAiD, please email [email protected].

Learn more about RAiD.

Read the joint announcement on the DataCite website.

The ARDC is funded through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.