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.

PID4NFDI aims to enhance PID integration within NFDI consortia, considering varying provider maturity levels and community adaption. 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.

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.