US RAiD Pilot FAQs

Why RAiD?

RAiD is a PID specifically for identifying and consolidating information about research projects to allow multiple stakeholders to contribute to the RAiD metadata. While ORCID is the open PID for researchers and ties a researcher’s affiliations, activities, and works information together all in one place, RAiD is the open PID for tying together all of the information about a research project and tracking the project over time. RAiD metadata is meant to include ORCID iDs for individual researchers who are involved, ROR IDs for organizational stakeholders, DOIs or other relevant object identifiers for outputs, and any relevant Grant IDs associated with the project. While many funders are starting to assign DOIs to grants/awards, not every grant has a 1:1 relationship with a project. Many projects are long-term, receiving multiple grants and involving multiple researchers and organizations as time goes on. RAiD provides a way to reliably consolidate and share that information.

What does participation in the US pilot involve?

Once the US RAiD infrastructure is available, interested pilot organizations would experiment with the RAiD API and/or submit project metadata through a web form to test out the RAID creation workflow and the process for making updates to existing RAID metadata, give feedback on any improvements that might be needed from a user perspective, and get a sense of the usefulness of RAiD for each organization. Organizations with the interest and resources to integrate the RAiD API with local systems or workflows would be welcome, but also one-off testing with the API and/or web form would be just as helpful. Pilot organizations’ use cases would be 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 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.

Is RAiD being used in other countries?

So far, RAiD is being used in Australia, and RAiD pilot initiatives are underway in Europe, led by SURF in The Netherlands. 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