Persistent Identifiers, a Core Component of Connected Research

The ARDC has partnered with international organisation FREYA on a three year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme.
FREYA

PIDapaplooza is on! Delegates (warmly known as PID [persistent identifier] nerds) from all over the world have descended onto Lisbon, Portugal to network and solve problems surrounding the use, sustainability and interoperability of PIDs. Over the next two days, 29-30 January 2020, Ms Natasha Simons and Dr Adrian Burton from The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), are giving talks at the conference.

PIDs enable the identification and connection of people (researchers), research institutions and research objects such as research data, research samples, files or documents. The ARDC has worked on PIDs over many years and we’ve partnered with international organisations like FREYA, a three year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme.

FREYA aims to extend the infrastructure for PIDs as a core component of open research, globally. It works to improve the PID landscape, facilitating discovery, navigation, retrieval, citation and access to research resources. Through the use of new provenance services, FREYA works to enable researchers to better evaluate data and make the scientific record more complete, reliable, and traceable.

One of the ways the ARDC has contributed to FREYA was through the fundamental design of the PID Graph — a graph that connects and integrates PID systems to create an information map of relationships across PIDs that provides a basis for new services. This was then incorporated into our national discovery service, Research Data Australia (RDA), an online portal for finding research data and associated projects, researchers, and data services.

Ms Natasha Simons, ARDC’s Associate Director Skilled Workforce, says PIDs provide industrial level standard referencing and identification.

“PIDs are a core component of national and global infrastructure; enabling research concepts, outputs and objects to be linked and creating a richer, coherent and connected experience.

“Without these sophisticated and common approaches to information and knowledge, Australian research will not be part of, or benefit from, the emerging global research information networks,” Ms Simons said.

Ms Simons has been working alongside Dr Adrian Burton, Director, Data Policy and Services, ARDC to drive this integral information and knowledge management services.

“The ARDC supports and connects with several persistent identifier services including DOI, IGSN, Handle, ORCID, PURL and the Research Activity Identifier (RAID). As part of the national research infrastructure we facilitate access to such services for Australian research institutions.

“In addition, we actively promote the use of PIDs to connect research coherently through a program of outreach and community engagement,” Dr Burton said.

The FREYA project is a good example of how the ARDC actively partners with other research organisations, working together to lead the way toward a research environment that better enables researchers to find, access, contribute to and effectively use data and services to maximise research quality and impact.

Read more about how ARDC is working with FREYA.