This blog post was written by Sheila Rabun in collaboration with Michael Shensky and Bryan Gee at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, based on presentations from the RAiD Global Community Meeting - Americas (May 20, 2026) and the Open Repositories virtual conference (June 10, 2026).
As part of the US RAiD Pilot, research data services staff at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries (UT Libraries) have been investigating the best approach for integrating Research Activity Identifiers (RAiD) into the Texas Data Repository, a multi-institutional Dataverse instance shared across several Texas universities and managed by the Texas Digital Library. Within the shared platform, UT Libraries has their own collection of over 1,500 datasets published over the last nine years by UT Austin researchers.
The Dataverse Project is an open source research data repository software platform and community led by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. There are roughly 150 Dataverse installations serving more than 900 organizations in 40 countries. While UT Libraries does not directly contribute code to Dataverse, they participate in Dataverse community meetings and contribute to Github issues.
Recently, UT Libraries has been exploring ways to increase usage of PIDs in dataset metadata to facilitate exploring connections between entities and make research outputs and metadata more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). As part of that effort, the Texas Data Repository recently activated a Dataverse ORCID integration so that authors’ authenticated ORCID iDs can be included in dataset metadata. Additionally, ROR is being used to identify research organizations for author affiliations, and DOIs, ARKs and handles can be used to indicate related resources, thanks to various plugins that have been developed by the Dataverse community and implemented in the Texas Data Repository.
Now, UT Libraries is actively exploring ways to further leverage PIDs in their data repository metadata to facilitate connections between individual research outputs and the overarching research projects they are related to. As a relatively new standard and persistent identifier (PID), RAiD is not yet integrated into most research information platforms, including Dataverse, and has only recently been added to the DataCite DOI metadata schema (version 4.7) as an identifier type for related resources.
We have wanted to be forward thinking and imagine how use of persistent identifiers might evolve moving forward, and so we were very interested in the US RAiD Pilot and wanted to get involved in an early stage, so that we could be at the forefront of exploring how [RAiD] can be integrated in the Texas Data Repository. – Michael Shensky, Head of Research Data Services, UT Libraries
The initial goal for UT Libraries’ interest in RAiD is to enable a workflow where researchers can create a RAiD for an overarching project and link their dataset(s) to that RAiD (or to an existing RAiD) as part of the dataset submission and management process within the repository. They have been exploring how to facilitate this workflow so that it is not only technically feasible but also easy and intuitive for the user. In the submission workflow, Dataverse has a Related Publication field, but not a Related Project field, and RAiD is not yet listed as an Identifier Type (see Fig. 1).
