PID4NFDI’s first year, PID support resources, and what’s to come next

3 February 2025

licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, reuses work by Premeditated

It has been an eventful and fruitful first year for PID4NFDI, the basic service for persistent identifiers in development for NFDI, the German National Research Data Infrastructure. PID4NFDI completed its first service development phase, the initialisation phase, at the end of 2024 and now heads into a second term, the two-year integration phase running in 2025 and 2026. In this blog post, we review and summarise PID4NFDI’s activities and outputs from the initialisation phase and preview what’s to come in the next two years.

Initialising

PID4NFDI started in 2024 as one of Base4NFDI’s basic services in development with an ambitious work programme set out for the initialisation phase, aiming to build an NFDI basic service on established PID infrastructures and provide a central point of contact for all questions related to PIDs. During the first year, the team of PID4NFDI has been building and expanding networks with stakeholders, introducing the services at consortia meetings, and presenting and networking at conferences such as PIDfest, the EOSC Symposium and the Base4NFDI User Conference (see our pages on events and publications). PID4NFDI also held its first own event with its stakeholder workshop, gathering insights from actors in and beyond NFDI regarding PID implementation and usage. What is more, PID4NFDI has completed and made available more than a dozen project deliverables which offer a wide range of support resources for PID implementation.

PID Support Resources

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are central to FAIR research data management. However, different disciplines and different resources result in diverse requirements and the 26 NFDI consortia have different levels of maturity in PID implementation. As there already is a mature and globally used PID provider landscape and PID needs are highly individual in the consortia, the intended service of PID4NFDI offers a set of several components (technical, organisational, standards, training, outreach) that are in their interaction tailored to the needs of NFDI stakeholders. In PID4NFDI’s initialisation phase several resources and a number of publications were produced in order to support PID implementation and accompanying requirements and activities concerning PIDs in the NFDI consortia and beyond. The following is an overview and a summary of these resources and publications.

PID4NFDI’s service page at Base4NFDI lists all the initialisation phase’s results (deliverables). Furthermore, publications are listed on our website and most are included in the Zenodo community of PID4NFDI.

PID Landscape Survey and Stakeholder Requirements

As one of the initial activities, PID4NFDI conducted an extensive survey on the PID Service Landscape in NFDI in April and May 2024. The survey aimed to evaluate the current level of PID adoption and integration among NFDI consortia and to understand their future needs in order to develop a PID service that aligns with the evolving requirements of the NFDI community. The results have now been published as a report. It contains a summary of the results with drawn conclusions. The survey question catalog has also been published as supplementary material.

Further insights regarding PID implementation and stakeholder requirements in NFDI were gathered at the PID4NFDI Stakeholder Workshop held in November 2024. It provided a forum for representatives from NFDI consortia and sections, national and international initiatives and projects, and other interested parties to share their perspectives on challenges, current practices and potential improvements in PID services. Our published report summarizes the workshop’s presentations and discussions.

Guides and Training

As a practical guide designed to help individuals and organizations to get started with PID registration and usage, PID4NFDI created the PID4NFDI Cookbook. It provides support for understanding what PIDs are, why they are important for long-term access and citation of digital resources, and how to integrate them into your workflows. Also check out our overview of PID services and providers.

PID4NFDI plans a modular, multi-level training approach to promote the effective use of PIDs across NFDI. The PID4NFDI Training Concept describes a roadmap for the development of according training offers and support services.

Use Case Analyses

Four different PID use cases within NFDI have been analysed by PID4NFDI in close collaboration with stakeholders from the respective consortia. Two of the use case analyses focus on an evaluation of the metadata quality and completeness (in the consortia FAIRagro and for the StrainInfo service within NFDI4Microbiota), while one takes a closer look at an example of PID adoption in the Text+ consortium and another one focuses on a PID registration service for dataset elements as offered by KonsortSWD. The use case analyses have been published as individual reports:

Technical Implementation and Metadata Interoperability

To support and enhance technical implementation of PIDs and metadata interoperability, PID4NFDI has published a concept for metadata interoperability, harmonization and technical integration of PID infrastructure. A recently published report presents the conceptual framework, which integrates insights from community surveys, interviews with use case partners, and extensive engagement with NFDI consortia members.

As an accompanying resource, a catalogue of metadata standards relevant to NFDI was developed. The catalogue itself (currently made available as a spreadsheet Google Docs) lists discipline-specific and generic metadata standards and is supplemented by a document which introduces, describes and contextualises the catalogue, and links to the actual catalogue itself.

You can find out more about PIDs and metadata in our metadata guide.

Governance, Business Models, Licensing

Another task of PID4NFDI is the analysis and documentation of governance, business, and license models of various PID providers and types. Complementing our overview of PID services and providers and similar upcoming support resources, a companion document outlining the conceptual and practical foundations for evaluating and selecting PID providers was published. It provides context for the overview of the current landscape of PID providers and types, and focuses on the principles of openness, sustainability, and governance as defined by the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).

As groundwork for a future governance structure for integrating PID services in NFDI, a concept for sustainable PID registration workflows that align with the NFDI’s governance and funding structure was developed and also recently published. It outlines framework conditions for an efficient and sustainable PID management within NFDI, the development of a PID selection and integration framework and the subsequent tasks for the PID Coordination Hub as the central point of contact for all questions related to PIDs within NFDI.

Outlook

After PID4NFDI’s initialisation phase and another successful funding proposal, starting with 2025, PID4NFDI has now progressed to the second phase of Base4NFDI’s iterative development phase model for service candidates. In this integration phase, running for two years, we will further enhance PID integration within NFDI consortia, considering varying provider maturity levels and community adoption. We will focus on supporting consortia infrastructure services to integrate PIDs throughout the research data lifecycle, using Data Management Plans (DMPs) and Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) as pilot implementations. Special emphasis will be placed on the integration of PIDs for entities for which PID registration is still emerging, such as research instruments, material samples, highly granular data, as well as projects and awards. Our goal is to boost the impact of PIDs by improving metadata quality and interoperability through technical, organisational, and strategic measures. Furthermore, governance guidelines, outreach efforts, and an extended, modular training concept will promote PID awareness and adoption across disciplines. This approach will be prototyped collaboratively with NFDI consortium partners, ensuring broad applicability within the NFDI framework. These efforts will together form the PID Coordination Hub, which will be a central entry point for users of the PID4NFDI service portfolio.

The PID4NFDI service team is looking forward to two more years of fruitful collaborations and discussions and to contributing in furthering the developments of the PID landscape in NFDI and beyond.