Research Activity Identifier Service (RAiD)

Overview

RAiD is a persistent identifier (PID) for research projects and activities that is now in production in Australia and Europe.
Governed by ISO Standard 23527:2022, with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) as the global Registration Authority, RAiD has been successfully implemented in the European context through FAIRCORE4EOSC, with SURF Netherlands serving as the European Registration Agency.
The implementation across the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) demonstrates RAiD's flexibility in different research contexts.

RAiD consists of a unique, resolvable DOI and a metadata record that connects organisations, people, inputs, and outputs to projects.
It serves as a container for other PIDs (ORCIDs, RORs, DOIs, etc.), linking research components while tracking project changes over time.

RAiD helps researchers by:

• Reducing administrative burden through automated metadata reuse

• Providing a single source of truth for project information

• Enabling multi-party administration across institutions

• Generating standardised landing pages for project discovery

• Supporting hierarchical relationships between projects

• Tracking project evolution through versioned metadata

RAiD contributes significantly to FAIRCORE4EOSC's PID Graph and RDGraph components, supplying crucial project metadata to Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs).
It implements DataCite DOI infrastructure and content negotiation standards, enhancing interoperability with other EOSC PID services.

The RAiD system enables funders to track research outputs and impacts, while research organisations benefit from improved project management and reporting capabilities, making research more transparent by exposing a project's make-up and evolution over time.

EXPLORE THE TOOL

Use Case by user

The Registration Authority (e.g. ARDC) will want to manage a collection of RAiD Registration Agencies’ ability to mint RAiDs as well as publish the official RAiD policy, versions, metadata schemas, vocabulary and standards.

 The Registration Agency (e.g. SURF) will want to mint RAiDs, resolve RAiDs, manage RAiD users (for individual access), manage RAiD service points (for organizational access), manage local RAiD metadata as well as vocab variations/extensions, and ensure local compliance to the RAiD standards for a collection of organizations. They will also want to provide feedback to the Registration Authority to influence policy and developments on behalf of a collection of organizations.

The PID Provider (e.g. DataCite) will want to provide information about how to integrate their PID into RAiD and/or integrate RAiD into their PID and community workflows to create a cohesive PID ecosystem.

The Research Administrator (e.g. University of Auckland, German Climate Computing Centre) will want RAiDs to act as a single source of truth about research projects to coordinate funding, reporting and other activities across organizations. This must be done in a way that is easy and fast to use, can be verified with multiple levels of users (e.g. researchers at their own and collaborating institutions), be integrated with their Current Research Information System (CRIS) and finance software, can easily have it’s data harvested, connected, aggregated and analyzed, can maintain appropriate access embargos, and represent hierarchical relationships between research activities. 

The Researcher (e.g. John Doe PhD at Plant Breeding at Wageningen University and Research) and Research Support Professional (e.g. Jack Doe at the UVA Library) will want to mint a RAiD for a project that can be built upon and provide a single source of truth about project metadata and components, including historical information, across an array of services including their organization’s CRIS. The method to do so must be easy to use and integrate with other metadata services to automatically and consistently populate information already in the RAiD into derivative metadata entries. RAiDs not under embargo must also be easily searchable so that Researchers and Research Support Professionals are able to find similar projects to promote collaboration and knowledge exchange. 

The National Research Funder (e.g. the Australian Research Council) or Private Funder (e.g. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) will want RAiDs to provide a single source of truth about research projects funded by their grants that sync with other platforms as information is added and can be used to track downstream outcomes and the long term impact of the grants. 

The Research Infrastructure Operator (e.g. EOSC) will want to have users of their infrastructure mint RAiDs to track resource’ use and outcomes. The RAiD schema must integrate with other schemas and vocabularies that the infrastructure has committed to and be synced to resolve changes to the RAiD made internally and externally by users with the  appropriate level of ownership. The infrastructure must also be able to recognize previously created RAiDs to minimize duplication and a seamless workflow within the infrastructure. 

The eResearch Organisation (e.g. Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation) will want RAiDs integrated into their metadata management software in a way that syncs with all other integrations to mint, update and resolve RAiDs to provide a single source of truth about projects documented within the software over time.

The Operator of a Research Platform (e.g. Open Science Framework) will want RAiDs integrated into their platform in a way that syncs with all other integrations to mint, update and resolve RAiDs to provide a single source of truth about projects documented within the platform over time. They will also want to track and expose the change history of a RAiD so that everyone can learn more about the history of the project in the name of open scholarship and data provenance. 

The Integrator/Harvestors (e.g. DataCite) will want to be able to harvest  a single source of truth about RAiD projects in a predictable way to aggregate and process project data for analysis.