Some reflections on the current PID landscape – with an emphasis on risks and trust issues

The current landscape around persistent identifiers (PIDs) keeps quickly evolving. Some PIDs like Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for publications and datasets or ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) for persistent author identification are already well-established, but there is also a whole additional range of emerging identifiers in the research area, often being implemented under competing approaches. These include among others identifiers for organisations (OrgIDs), for research grants (grantIDs), and projects (RAIDs), for research equipment and facilities (PIDINSTs) and for physical samples (IGSNs).

This is then a timely moment to explore the risks and trust-related issues associated with an ever wider implementation of PIDs. Following an earlier work on ‘risks and trust in pursuit of a well-functioning Persistent Identifier infrastructure for research’ conducted by the Knowledge Exchange (KE) Task & Finish Group on PIDs, the KE commissioned a study in July 2021 to look deeper into these issues. This work, undertaken by the signatories of this paper, will result in the publication of a report and a series of case studies on specific areas of current PID development. At the time the CRIS2022 Conference takes place the work is still underway, but already advanced enough to describe its methodology, early findings, landscape analysis and early recommendations. The full project results are expected to be published by the KE by the end of 2022.