About PID4NFDI

Persistent Identifier Services for the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)

PID4NFDI is a basic service for persistent identifiers in development for the German National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur – NFDI). PID4NFDI is part of Base4NFDI and is currently in its initialisation phase, the first of three service development phases.

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are central to FAIR research data management. However, different disciplines and different resources result in diverse requirements and the different NFDI consortia have different levels of maturity in PID implementation. PID4NFDI will design a work programme to build an NFDI foundation service on established PID infrastructures.

As there already is a mature and globally used PID provider landscape and PID needs are highly individual in the consortia, we define our intended service as a set of several components (technical, organisational, standards, training, outreach) that are in their interaction tailored to the needs of NFDI stakeholders.

What are the goals, projects and services of PID4NFDI?

PID4NFDI aims to enhance PID integration within NFDI consortia, considering varying provider maturity levels and community adaptation. Our goal is to boost PID impact by improving metadata quality and interoperability through technical, organisational, and strategic measures. Governance guidelines, outreach efforts, and a modular training concept will promote PID awareness and adoption across disciplines, prototyped collaboratively with consortia partners to ensure broad applicability within NFDI. The interoperability, metadata, governance, training/support, and community engagement components will together form the PID Coordination Hub, which will be a central entry point for users of the PID4NFDI service portfolio.

To enable repository managers to optimize the integration of PIDs into their workflows,
To support trainers in the FDM field with materials and information,
To demonstrate to researchers, decision-makers, and funders the added value of PIDs for their own workflows and processes,
To provide best practices for different use cases to NFDI multipliers like sections and working groups.

PID4NFDI is organized internally by different work packages that cover these measures and areas of engagement. We operate as part of Base4NFDI, a joint initiative of all 26 consortia within NFDI to foster and establish reliable NFDI-wide basic services, and are one of several basic services in development.

In which development phase is PID4NFDI?

Initialisation Phase

first phase (12 months)

January 2024 – Present current

Integration Phase

second phase (24 months)

January 2025 – December 2026 in preparation