Persistent Identifiers

Persistent Identifiers serve as unique and enduring labels assigned to digital objects, resources, or entities, encompassing a wide array of items such as research datasets, academic papers, books, websites, and more. Notably, PIDs can also be assigned to individual researchers (ORCID) and research institutions (ROR), ensuring a comprehensive and interconnected scholarly ecosystem.

  1. ORCID is uniquely identifying and connecting individual researchers to their contributions, fostering collaboration and recognition.
  2. The Research Organization Registry (ROR) assigns PIDs to research institutions, contributing to a more structured and interconnected research landscape.
  3. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) uniquely identify and ensure the persistent accessibility of diverse digital objects and scholarly outputs.

Related resources

  • The FREYA project; project-freya.eu/en FREYA was a 3-year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme. The project started in December 2017 and ended in december 2020. It aimed to build the infrastructure for persistent identifiers as a core component of open science, in the EU and globally.

  • ARK Alliance – arks.org
    Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) serve as persistent identifiers, or stable, trusted references for information objects. Among other things, they aim to be web addresses (URLs) that don’t return 404 Page Not Found errors. The ARK Alliance is an open global community supporting the ARK infrastructure on behalf of research and scholarship.
    Getting Started with ARK Persistent Identifiers; https://youtu.be/fwlePgYar58?si=43jzcdvo3lFFvNhe
    A 30-minute tutorial introduction to ARK (Archival Resource Key) persistent identifiers. For general audiences and those considering implementing ARKs at their institutions.

  • COAR (Sep 2023). Persistent Identifiers: Addressing the challenges of global adoption. Available at https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/…/ The aim of this blog post is to raise awareness about certain issues related to the adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs), which especially impact developing countries, and to propose an alternative approach that will enable greater global inclusiveness and more widespread adoption of PIDs across the world.

  • Hendricks G and Buys M (Oct 2023). Working for Global Equity through Digital Object Identifiers. Available at https://doi.org/10.54900/6sz4q-47185By embracing DataCite and Crossref DOIs, the global scholarly community is empowered, reducing financial barriers and fostering broad creation, dissemination, and recognition of research outputs and resources.

  • Ksibi N, Owango J, & El-Gebali S (May 2023). Africa PID Alliance Digital Object Identifiers Registration Concept Note. Available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7924069 The objective of this document is to structure the feasibility, implementation, and manageability of the project. A survey on the African continental level will shed light on or provide insights on the need for a DOI Registration Agency tailored to the continental context.

  • LIBSENSE Working Group on Infrastructure (May 2023). Roadmap for Implementing PIDs in Africa. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7970386This strategy document prepared by the LIBSENSE Working Group on Infrastructure outlines a roadmap for implementing Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) in Africa.  PIDs serve as long-lasting references to digital objects, enhancing the cohesion and discoverability of African scholarly content.

  • Ogot, M., & Onyango, G. M. (Mar 2023). Does Universities’ Research Output Aligned to National Development Goals Impact Economic Productivity? Evidence from Kenya. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 58(6), 1005-1020. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00219096221080196
    Few studies on developing countries have investigated the alignment of research output to a country’s development agenda and economic productivity. Using evidence from Kenya, this study sought to empirically determine whether the country’s research output is aligned to its development agenda in the first instance and to establish the output’s relationship to economic productivity.

  • Okune, A., & Chan, L. (2023). Digital Object Identifier: Privatising Knowledge Governance through Infrastructuring. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8339087
    This chapter uses what has become arguably the most ubiquitous piece of thinking infrastructure, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), as a point of entry to explore the infrastructuring of hegemonic power in knowledge circulation. The chapter opens with a technical explanation of the DOI, followed by a brief history of the formation of the organizations that undergird the DOI. Along with the other metric devices, emerging “norms” and narratives about the DOI further reinforce its centrality and we spend time debunking these myths. We close by exploring and making visible the relational work that the DOI performs to enable and shape the development of surveillance publishing, a dominant mode of profit and cognitive extraction in the higher education and research market.

  • Bezuidenhout L and Havemann J (Nov 2020). The varying openness of digital open science tools. Available at https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.26615.2Digital open science tools carry the promise of enabling collaboration across disciplines, world regions, and language groups through responsive design. We therefore encourage long-term funding mechanisms and ethnically as well as culturally inclusive approaches serving local prerequisites and conditions to tool design and construction allowing a globally connected digital research infrastructure to evolve in a regionally balanced manner.
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