After the initial US stakeholders meeting for RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) in May 2025, the US RAiD Pilot has continued to move forward with collecting several potential RAiD use cases that reflect the various goals and needs of stakeholders across the research and scholarly communication ecosystem. An overview of the 13 use cases gathered so far can be found below. To stay in the loop with future developments or submit additional use cases, please complete the US RAiD Pilot Interest Form.
Representatives from the US RAiD Pilot team will be speaking at several upcoming events to continue sharing information about RAiD and the US pilot, including the NSF-funded FAIR Facilities & Instruments September 2025 workshop at NSF NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Sept. 23, 2025), the International Data Week (IDW) conference in Brisbane, Australia (Oct. 15, 2025), a webinar hosted by the Health Research Alliance for their members (Oct. 23, 2025), and a meeting of the NSF CI Compass FAIR Data Topical Working Group (Feb. 5, 2026).
US RAiD Pilot Initial Use Cases
All of the primary use cases identified so far involve interest in the first three of the following workflows; interest in the fourth workflow (collecting existing RAiD identifiers) varies depending on the specifics of each use case:
- Creating a RAiD record for a project
- Including a RAiD identifier in the metadata of related outputs
- Updating the metadata for an existing RAiD record (such as adding new outputs, researchers, organizations, and grant information)
- Collecting an existing RAiD identifier during metadata submission workflows (such as publication, repository, or grant application submission)
The logistics and best practices for implementing and maintaining these workflows will be explored and tested as pilot participants begin to work with the US RAiD technical infrastructure. The use cases outlined below are currently in the exploratory phase; further details will be shared as these concepts are refined and tested.
Many thanks to the following stakeholders for sharing their RAiD use cases in this early stage of the US RAiD Pilot:
- CI Compass
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
- NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
- iPlaces
- ProposalCentral
- US Federal Agencies
- University of Michigan Libraries and Press
- CyVerse
- Open Science Framework
- myLaminin
- ResearchSpace
- University of Texas at Austin
- Louisiana State University
Research Project Groups
Research project groups and teams can use RAiD to track, manage, and share information about their projects, including multi-organizational research groups, disciplinary researcher groups, researcher associations, and more. Project managers can provide the necessary metadata to create RAiDs, and authorized team members can collectively update RAiD metadata. RAiD records are visible publicly on the web and can be used to share information about the project with other stakeholders.
NSF CI Compass
NSF CI Compass, an initiative funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), offers cyberinfrastructure support and expertise to NSF Major and Mid-scale Research Facilities. With a collaborative team of experts and students spanning multiple institutions, CI Compass produces a wide range of outputs to advance research cyberinfrastructure, such as technical reports, webinars, and curriculum materials, which are shared through platforms like Zenodo and Github. The CI Compass team has been working to keep track of the many contributors and related outputs across institutions, some of which involve other facilities or collaborators that are not necessarily included in the core CI Compass NSF grant. The team is interested in exploring the possibilities of using RAiD to help streamline these tracking efforts over time and to capture relationships and contributions that would otherwise not be documented in official grant reports. For CI Compass, this would involve creating a single RAiD populated with metadata about the collaborators, their institutional affiliations, related outputs and resources, and grant funding related to the initiative. The CI Compass RAiD could then be included in the metadata of other relevant Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), such as DOIs for the various outputs.
Research Facilities
Research facilities and laboratories can use RAiD to help track all project-based research activity associated with the facility. RAiDs could also be used to help gather information related to the usage of specific instruments as well.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
As the largest science and energy laboratory for the US Department of Energy (DOE), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and its affiliated researchers are involved in multiple large scale research projects. Staff at ORNL have already been working to streamline how research activity is tracked and shared by introducing an iterative, machine-assisted process for collecting, standardizing, analyzing, and storing research activity data. ORNL’s existing workflows already include collecting ORCID iDs for researchers and assigning DataCite DOIs to research outputs. Staff at ORNL are interested in using RAiD to further streamline their efforts, going beyond traditional publication tracking to include all relevant research activity and create a unified and structured view of ORNL’s wide-ranging research portfolio. By creating RAiDs for ORNL projects, updating RAiD metadata over time, and including RAiDs in the metadata of related identifiers such as DOIs assigned to datasets or other outputs, RAiD could be used to share insights into ORNL’s capabilities with current and potential sponsors, help researchers align their skills with ongoing work, and enable internal teams to better manage resources and reduce duplication.
NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
At the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a center of research excellence in Earth system science sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), tracking the impact of related research activity is both a challenge and a priority. NSF NCAR supports the university research community with specialized resources such as radar systems, solar observatories, and advanced computational models for complex projects like tornado tracking, climate, and solar research. To help measure the impact of these resources, NSF NCAR has long assigned DataCite DOIs to datasets and other outputs and resources to enable citation tracking and usage metrics. As a single identifier that can be used to bundle related research entities (such as grants, datasets, software, models, and physical instruments) together in a structured, automated way, RAiD could be used to represent each project as a whole and track its evolving components over time. Similarly, RAiDs could be used to track and share activity related to high-level assets like research aircraft and other instruments that often go un-cited, to get a clearer picture of how these resources contribute to research outcomes.
iPlaces
iPlaces is a new publishing platform that connects field stations (scientific facilities adjacent to the natural environment) and the places they steward to downstream research outputs through projects. iPlaces currently offers a limited set of field stations the ability to publish research project summaries and issue a DataCite DOI for projects accepted to conduct work around the station. Through this project publication, iPlaces shifts the first publication for a research project from a journal article (often long after fieldwork is complete and with inconsistent connections to the station, to pre-fieldwork, immediately connecting that publication to the station through ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifiers and potentially to associated local communities through Local Contexts, Traditional Knowledge, and Biocultural Notices and Labels. Using DOIs, iPlaces has demonstrated the power of building on shared research infrastructure and the value of a citable project research object linked to the station, people, organizations, and downstream outputs, such as papers and datasets, through relationships in the DataCite metadata. The iPlaces team is excited by the potential of RAiD and is interested in participating in the US RAiD pilot to explore with other early adopters what this new project-specific metadata schema might offer.
Funders & Grants Management
Organizations that provide research funding may be interested in using RAiD to track activities related to programmatic areas of funding, to enable better data collection toward impact assessment and insights into return on investment. To the extent that funders that are using other Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) in their workflows such as ORCID iDs and Grant DOIs, funders can also play a role in connecting RAiDs with relevant PIDs, for example, including RAiDs in Grant DOI metadata and including Grant DOIs in RAiD metadata.
ProposalCentral
Altum’s ProposalCentral, a software system for managing grant application and reporting workflows, is used by over 280 funding organizations and over one million researchers across the globe. ProposalCentral has built-in functionality for gathering researchers’ authenticated ORCID iDs, generating Crossref Grant IDs for specific awards, and writing funding award and peer review activity to researchers’ ORCID records to enable more efficient data collection for assessing funding impact and return on investment. Altum is exploring multiple ways to embed RAiD into ProposalCentral, including the ability for researchers to include an existing RAiD in their grant applications and reports and the ability for funders to create RAiDs to track multi-grant projects they fund at a programmatic level, enabling long-term visibility into project outcomes even after the grant period.
US Federal Agencies
Several US Federal Agencies have expressed interest in using RAiD as a way to track, manage, and share information about long term or complex projects, intramural research (not identified by a single grant or contract number), budget line-item projects, and projects that are funded by multiple agencies. Several federal agencies are already using ORCID for researchers and DOIs for research outputs, awards, and grants in their funding and repository workflows. RAiD could be used to tie project-based relationships and entities together to enable a more comprehensive understanding of federally funded research activity.
Publishers
Scholarly publishers and university presses are crucial stewards of connected metadata across the bibliographic record, as publication DOI metadata serves as a central hub for indicating relationships between research outputs, authors, and authors’ affiliations. With the addition of RAiD, relevant project information can also be included. Publishers can gather existing RAiDs from authors during the manuscript submission process, and include RAiDs in publication DOI metadata.
University of Michigan Libraries and Press
The University of Michigan Library and University of Michigan Press are interested in exploring how the outputs of academic publishing, data repositories, and fieldwork can be seamlessly linked through RAiD to support the connection and discoverability of scholarly work as it emerges in many forms. For example, the digital outputs from a series of archaeological excavations in northern Albania known as PASH (Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës, or Archaeological Investigations in a Northern Albanian Province) are available in University of Michigan’s Deep Blue Data repository, while related e-books containing maps, photographs, and interactive resources are published through the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology's publishing imprint on the Fulcrum platform. The Libraries and Press are already including persistent identifiers like ORCID, DOIs, and ROR in their publication and repository workflows, and RAiD could be added for projects like PASH to tie related resources and activity together across platforms. In addition to the technical and metadata aspects of RAiD integration, the Libraries and Press are well positioned to work with researchers and other campus stakeholders to introduce RAiDs early in the research lifecycle and serve as a guide for educating researchers about how RAiDs work and why they matter.
Research Platforms & Frameworks
Software platforms used by researchers to manage projects and project materials are key for integration with RAiD, as researchers are already working in these spaces and providing all of the relevant project metadata that would be needed to create and maintain a RAiD. Depending on the type of software platform, use cases may include creating RAiDs and/or tracking and connecting information relevant to RAiD.
CyVerse
Based at the University of Arizona, CyVerse is an NSF-funded open source software service that provides comprehensive cyberinfrastructure for research computing. Researchers using CyVerse can upload, store, analyze, discover, and share large datasets, which are automatically assigned DataCite DOIs for persistent identification. CyVerse is interested in using RAiD to link DOIs for publications, datasets, and other outputs back to overarching projects to enable better discovery and tracking across the full research lifecycle, especially across collaborative working groups where multiple researchers contribute to shared data resources. To streamline the creation and updating of RAiDs, CyVerse is considering using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source Artificial Intelligence (AI) protocol enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with APIs, to generate and pre-populate RAiD metadata that researchers can then review and approve.
Open Science Framework
The Open Science Framework (OSF), managed by the Center for Open Science (COS), provides a free, open source workspace that researchers have used for over a decade to discover, collaborate, analyze, and share research projects and related materials. Building on existing services, which include the ability to assign DOIs and connect ORCID iDs with outputs, the COS plans to more fully develop the OSF to support dynamic research activity hubs, where researchers can describe their project with rich metadata, connect outputs from OSF and beyond (like datasets, protocols, or publications), and assign a RAiD to their project. The vision for the new OSF hubs is to provide centralized views of research activities, where outputs can be added continuously and tracked via RAiD, evolving with the project over time.
myLaminin
myLaminin, a secure and research-agnostic Research Data Management (RDM) platform, is exploring the use of RAiD to further strengthen its support of the full research lifecycle, from data collection to archiving and publication. The platform already leverages ORCID and DOIs, and enables researchers and research teams to secure their research data, facilitate global collaboration, and monitor compliance with regulatory standards. The myLaminin team has integrated with RAiD so that RAiDs can be created at project initiation and included in the metadata of other relevant identifiers, project collaborators can be alerted that a RAiD has been issued for a project they are involved in, RAiD metadata can be updated as needed over time, and more.
ResearchSpace
ResearchSpace (RSpace), is a secure, web-based research data management platform that integrates electronic lab notebook capabilities with inventory management, research tools, and research infrastructure. RSpace is planning to implement RAiD integration to streamline research activity tracking across the full lifecycle of a project without adding to researchers' administrative workload. To achieve this, RSpace plans to enable researchers to define projects using RAiD identifiers within RSpace and automate the reporting of repository exports to RAiD records. RSpace also plans to ingest RAiD metadata from external sources and propagate it across connected tools, services, and infrastructure.
Research Institutions
Universities, colleges, and research institutes can benefit from RAiD in many different ways across various organizational units. Some areas of an organization may want to create RAiDs in addition to using existing RAiDs to help track information about research projects that the organization’s researchers are involved in. For libraries, a primary goal is to include RAiDs in the metadata of work DOIs in data and institutional repositories. For research and sponsored programs offices, creating RAiDs to help track projects led by the institution could be beneficial for assessment, enabling a better understanding of the research activities associated with the organization. As with ORCID adoption at a research institution, cross-institutional collaboration will be key for strategic implementation of RAiD at the institutional level.
University of Texas at Austin Libraries
Staff in the UT Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin are interested in integrating RAiDs into the metadata of datasets published to the Texas Data Repository (TDR) to help researchers link their datasets to the broader research projects with which they are associated. TDR is a consortial data repository managed by Texas Digital Library and built on open source Dataverse software. The UT Libraries are interested in exploring the best approach for metadata management and potential RAiD API integration that could be used by Texas institutions represented in the repository. RAiD support in the Texas Data Repository would ideally allow for creation of a new RAiD at the time a dataset is published and alternatively allow existing RAiDs created through an external process to be added to the metadata of TDR datasets, with both approaches resulting in dataset information being added to metadata for the corresponding RAiD. Since DOIs are minted for datasets published through TDR, an additional goal would be for RAiDs to also be automatically incorporated into a dataset’s DOI metadata.
Louisiana State University Libraries
Louisiana State University (LSU) Libraries is exploring the integration of RAiDs into its research infrastructure to enhance project transparency and institutional reporting. Initial ideas include connecting RAiDs with the university’s institutional repository (IR), hosted on Digital Commons, and its Tiger Den data repository, with data-sharing enabled by Globus. The Libraries are considering pilot collaborations with LSU-led research teams to test workflows and gather insights on how RAiDs could scale effectively across campus. As Tiger Den supports data capture throughout the course of a project, and the IR focuses on finalized outputs like theses and dissertations, a key area of interest is identifying how best to manage RAiDs at different stages of the research process.