US RAiD Pilot

FAQ

Why RAiD?

RAiD is a Persistent Identifier (PID) and ISO standard (ISO 23527:2022) specifically for identifying and registering information about research projects to allow multiple stakeholders to share project information and contribute to RAiD metadata. RAiD is the open PID for tying together all of the information about a research project and tracking changes related to the project over time. RAiD metadata is meant to include ORCID iDs for individual researchers who are involved in the project, ROR IDs for organizational stakeholders, DOIs or other relevant object identifiers for outputs, and any relevant Grant DOIs associated with the project. RAiD is specifically designed to support the dynamic nature of research projects over time, for example, researchers and partner organisations may join or leave the project, project names may change, outputs are created over time, etc. RAiD provides a standardized way to reliably consolidate and share that information, enabling a snapshot of the state of a project at a particular point in time in addition to a more complete picture of project-based activities and relationships.

What is the difference between RAiD and a Grant DOI?

Grant DOIs and RAiDs serve related but distinct purposes. Grant DOIs identify individual grants or awards, while RAiDs identify projects. Although grants and projects are often connected, they are not the same thing

A grant represents funding transferred from a funding organization to a recipient to support specific activities, whereas a project is a time-bound endeavor undertaken to achieve a particular goal or outcome, often generating new knowledge. A single project may receive multiple grants over its lifetime, and some projects may not involve grants at all.

RAiD provides a project-centered way to document and track all activity associated with a project, including inputs such as grants. Grant DOIs describe a specific funding from a grant-focused perspective, capturing details such as funding amount, currency, and duration. Grant DOIs can be referenced within a RAiD record, and RAiDs can be referenced within Grant DOI records, but the relationship between a grant and a project is not necessarily one-to-one.

How is RAiD different from DOIs?

  • International Standards: RAiD is the international standard (ISO 23527:2022) for identifying and describing research projects, as of 2022. DOIs are the international standard (ISO 26324:2025) for identifying and describing objects, like articles, datasets, physical items, or funding. Projects are dynamic activities or endeavors, not objects, hence the need for different standards for the two.
  • Metadata Schema: As both a PID and a global registry for research projects, the RAiD metadata schema is designed specifically for projects, and RAiD Registration Agencies around the globe can customize or extend the metadata schema to support regional or domain-specific needs. RAiD is also designed to allow multiple authenticated users to contribute RAiD metadata.
  • Type of contribution: Most DOIs are assigned to research outputs and added to the “Works” section of a researcher’s ORCID record. While a work, such as a publication, in itself can represent the outcome of a project, projects often involve multiple works, and contributor roles within a project can span beyond producing the publication. To reflect this, RAiD project contributions are added to the “Professional Activities” section of a contributor’s ORCID record as a “Membership”, indicating that the individual is a member of the project.
  • Capturing project evolution: Since project contributors and organizations can tend to change over time, RAiD includes date ranges for those fields to indicate when and for how long a person or organization was involved in a project. 
  • Landing pages: RAiD provides built-in, automatically-generated landing pages. DOIs require a URL field to indicate landing page location that must continue to resolve over time.

What is the relationship between RAiD and DataCite?

DataCite is a key partner with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the global RAiD Registration Authority, and provides prefixes and suffixes for RAiD identifiers. Operationally, the ARDC manages a RAiD consortium within the DataCite membership structure, with RAiD Registration Agencies and their corresponding Service Points as consortium organizations. RAiDs are also integrated into DataCite Commons where project dashboards are available (see example). To learn more about the relationship between RAiD and DataCite, please see the following blog posts:

What does participation in the US pilot involve?

The US RAiD Pilot demo environment is now available and several organizations are already participating in the pilot, experimenting with the RAID API and/or entering project metadata into the RAiD web form to test RAID creation and editing workflows for their various use cases. Pilot participants are asked to provide feedback on any improvements that may be needed to the RAiD interface, metadata schema, and other aspects related to RAiD adoption. Pilot organizations’ use cases are being documented and shared, and participants may be asked to present on their experience with RAiD at webinars or community calls. At this time, there are no costs to pilot participants and no requirements for how much or how little a pilot organization would be involved, as there is room for flexibility depending on the level of interest and resources available. If your organization has a potential use case for RAiD, please email projectpid@ucsd.edu. 

What is the RAiD metadata schema?

The RAiD metadata schema can be found at http://metadata.raid.org. RAiD uses an extensive metadata schema specifically for projects in order to accurately and effectively meet the needs for tracking research projects over time. RAiD metadata is dynamic, meaning that there is flexibility in which properties can be included in RAiD metadata records. Additionally, as changes are made to RAiD metadata, new information is appended, rather than over-written. Versioning takes place at the metadata level, so changes are visible over the course of a project.

The RAiD metadata schema avoids storing redundant information. For example, with relatedObjects, RAiD stores only the identifier and its relationship to the project. The specific creators, contributors, and other details for a specific relatedObject can be retrieved from its own metadata. Similarly, information about contributor affiliations should be stored in the contributor’s ORCID record, rather than the RAiD record. 

Are there any examples of real RAiD records?

All RAiDs are openly accessible with open metadata that can be viewed on built-in RAiD landing pages. Existing live RAiDs can be explored at https://static.prod.raid.org.au/raids/. RAiDs can also be viewed in DataCite Commons by specifying “RAiD Registry” as the repository type in the search interface; see: https://commons.datacite.org/doi.org?query=*&repository-type=RAiDRegistry 

Who is responsible for initially creating a RAiD for a project?

The creator of the RAiD will vary depending on the scenario. The following stakeholders are most likely to create a RAiD (note that other use cases may emerge involving different stakeholders, so this is not an exhaustive list):

  • Individual researcher - 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 a project management software system, software platforms provided and maintained by a research institution, lab, facility, library, etc., or directly in the RAiD graphical user interface when authenticated through a RAiD service point (organization that is participating in RAiD creation).
  • Research organization, Lab, Facility, Library, etc. - A research organization may choose to create RAiDs to track and manage projects that the organization is affiliated with, leading, or responsible for. The organization would serve as a RAiD service point, using the RAiD API to automate the RAiD creation process in coordination with other relevant software systems and workflows. Or, individual administrators can authenticate through their service point to manually create RAiDs using the graphical user interface.
  • Funding organization - A funding organization 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.

How will contributors know if a RAiD already exists for a certain project?

  • Project title and contributor information are required for creating a RAiD. ORCID iDs must be used to specify project contributors. When an individual’s ORCID iD is added to a RAiD record for the first time, they will receive a notification in their ORCID inbox, asking them to authorize RAiD to read from and write to their ORCID record. This notification lets the contributors know that a RAiD exists for the specific project. If the researcher authorizes RAiD as a trusted party on their ORCID record, the project will be added to their ORCID record automatically as a membership entry in the Professional Activities section of their ORCID record (indicating that they are a member of the project). Subsequent RAiDs containing the contributor’s ORCID iD will be automatically written to their ORCID record, and they will receive a notification each time a new project is added to their ORCID record via RAiD. An example of an ORCID record containing project information from RAiD can be found at https://orcid.org/0009-0009-6625-8630. 

Is RAiD being used in other countries?

RAiD is currently being used in Australia, where for example, the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is actively using RAiD for the National Environmental Science Program (NESP). NESP is allocated to four hubs, which then further allocate funding to projects taking place around Australia. RAiDs minted by the DCCEEW and the various NESP project hubs can be explored:

SURF in the Netherlands is piloting RAiD and planning to provide a RAiD service for the European Union as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). 

The African PID Alliance (APA) has been exploring the use of RAiD in APA systems and services. 

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada has started work on a three year Canadian RAiD pilot in partnership with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN).

Expressions of interest from stakeholders in other parts of the world have also recently been shared, and we expect to see more interest as time goes on.

For example, the following article explores the use of RAiD in Research.fi, Finland’s national service for collecting, integrating and disseminating information on research conducted in Finland:

  • Tommi Suominen, Clifford Tatum, Sonja Sipponen, Walter Rydman, Shawn Ross, “Piloting the use of RAiD in Research.fi”, Procedia Computer Science, Volume 249, 2024, Pages 224-231, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2024.11.068