RAiD in the Research Ecosystem

Research today is increasingly collaborative, distributed, and data-intensive. Projects routinely span institutions, disciplines, and national borders, often involving different people, funding, infrastructure, and organizations over time. In this complex landscape, the stakeholders involved in the research process have been looking for more efficient ways to keep a record of research outputs, activities, and relationships between projects in the research and scholarly communication ecosystem, to get a better idea of research activity, impact, and return on investment. RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) is designed to help with this endeavor.

The Missing Link: Identifying Research Projects

The research ecosystem already relies heavily on persistent identifiers (PIDs) to help make research outputs and research information more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) in accordance with the FAIR Principles; for example:

• DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) identify research outputs like publications, datasets, and software, as well as other types of resources like samples and instruments
• ORCID iDs (Open Researcher & Contributor Identifier) identify researchers and help to tie contributors to their contributions, even if their name or career changes over time
• ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs identify research organizations
• Grant DOIs identify specific funding awards

Adoption of these PIDs has been increasing, with several countries around the world developing national approaches to PID adoption, through national PID strategies or policies, and funders, publishers, and research institutions requiring the use of PIDs as an essential best practice for research integrity. With these PIDs and the metadata they contain, we can gather information to get a better idea of research activity in general, but in many cases, context is missing. Until recently, there has been no globally recognized identifier or standard way to represent the research activity itself: the project, program, or collaboration that connects and involves people, organizations, funding, outputs, and other resources in relationship together.

RAiD provides that missing link as a persistent, globally unique identifier and global registry for research projects, designed to link people, outputs, funding, infrastructure, and institutions from a project perspective, in a structured, standardized, and machine-readable way.

Graphic depicting the connections between a researcher (ORCID iD), their organization (ROR), grants (Grant DOI), research data (DOI), and publications (DOI), with the research project (RAiD) in the center. Graphic adapted from https://researchgraph.org/national-graph/

What Is RAiD?

RAiD is a Persistent Identifier (PID) and internationally recognized standard (ISO 23527:2022) specifically for identifying and registering information about research projects, allowing multiple stakeholders to openly record and share project information as RAiD metadata. Launched in 2022 by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), RAiD is specifically designed to support the dynamic nature of research projects, which are often long-term, receiving multiple grants and involving multiple researchers and organizations over time. Researchers and partner organisations may join or leave a project, project names may change, and outputs are created over time. RAiD provides a way to reliably consolidate, capture, and share this kind of project-specific metadata to describe:

• Who is involved (via ORCID iDs)
• Which organizations are involved (via ROR IDs)
• What inputs, resources, or funding supports the work (via DOIs)
• What outputs are produced (via DOIs and other PIDs)
• When the project or activity starts, evolves, and ends
• Other pertinent project information (such as title(s), description(s), subject(s), spatial coverage, and access information)

RAiD connects existing identifiers to reflect a more accurate picture of activities and relationships across the research lifecycle. As research information is often siloed across various organizational software systems like grants management platforms, publishing platforms, and data repositories, RAiD allows these systems to reference the same research activity using a shared identifier and open metadata record.

Graphic depicting a network of relationships between a research facility, an organization, researchers, a paper, projects, and a capability. Graphic created by Jason Wohlgemuth for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ACORN (Accessible Content Optimization for Research Needs) workflow, from https://slides.com/jhwohlgemuth/raid-pilot#/11/0/0

RAiD Across the Research Cycle

A RAiD can be created early in the research process during project planning or the initial funding application stage, and updated as the project evolves over time.

Who creates a RAID?

Individual researchers are most likely to know all of the details about a project they are leading or involved in from the beginning, so it makes sense for individual researchers to have the ability to create RAiDs through project management software platforms, software systems provided and maintained by a research institution, lab, facility, library, etc., or directly in the RAiD graphical user interface when authenticated through an organization that is participating in RAiD creation(aka RAiD service point).

Research organizations, labs, facilities, libraries, and other organizations may choose to create RAiDs to track and manage projects that the organization is affiliated with, leading, or otherwise responsible for.

Funding organizations may choose to create RAiDs to track activity related to overarching funding areas, such as a cohort of grants awarded to different researchers/organizations as part of a programmatic research initiative.

Benefits Across the Ecosystem

RAiD can provide benefits throughout and beyond the research lifecycle, with advantages for multiple stakeholders. For specific examples of RAiD use cases from different stakeholder perspectives, see US RAiD Pilot Initial Use Cases.

Researchers and Research Groups

With a RAiD assigned to their project, researchers have a single reference point for all of the collaborators and outputs involved, allowing for easier documentation and attribution of collaborative work, as well as reduced administrative burden when reporting. RAiD uses ORCID iDs to identify individual contributors; when an ORCID iD is added to a RAiD record for the first time, the individual will receive a notification in their ORCID inbox with the option to have the project added to their ORCID record automatically. This can be especially helpful for recognition and evaluation of early career researchers, showing that although they may have no publications on their ORCID record yet, they are or have been actively involved in one or more research projects. 

A RAiD project entry on a contributor’s ORCID record, written as a “membership” affiliation in the “professional activities” section of the ORCID record, to indicate that the contributor is a member of the project (https://orcid.org/0009-0009-6625-8630).

Funders

During the grant application process, funders can ask researchers to provide any existing RAiDs for projects they may have been or are currently working on relevant to the proposal in order to get a better idea of related endeavors and researchers’ networks, which can help with evaluation and assessment of funding applications. Funders can also choose to create RAiDs to uniquely identify overarching areas of focus for which they provide multiple grants, or in instances where multiple funding streams are involved to support a wider initiative, to help track bigger-picture research activity, impact, and return on investment. For funders, RAiD enables transparent links between funding, activities, and outcomes for improved monitoring and evaluation, and stronger evidence for research impact over time.

When a researcher applies for grant funding, RAiDs for any relevant projects can be shared to help the funder gather and assess information about the researcher and their activities as part of the proposal evaluation process. Interactive PID cycle graphic from https://resources.morebrains.coop/pidcycle/

Publishers & Repositories

When researchers share and publish their findings, they can reference the RAiD for any relevant project that their outputs are related to as an indication of broader context. Publishers and repositories can include RAiDs in work metadata to ensure transparency and help to link the work back to RAiD records. Inclusion of RAiD in work metadata serves to bolster the existing effort toward linking related PIDs together for improved discovery and reuse of research outputs, as well as clearer provenance and project-based relationships.

RAiDs can be included in publication/work metadata alongside other foundational Persistent Identifiers (PIDs).  Interactive PID cycle graphic from https://resources.morebrains.coop/pidcycle/

Research Institutions

For research institutes, universities, health and hospital systems, and other organizations that employ researchers and support research activities, RAiD provides a standardized and interoperable way to identify research projects, project-based networks, and outputs related to the organization, for clearer visibility of research activity portfolios and ultimately improved reporting accuracy and compliance.