Collaborative Research: Cross-Cutting Improvements: FAIR Facilities and Instruments: Enabling transparency, reproducibility, and equity through persistent identifiers

University Corporation For Atmospheric Res, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This research coordination network (RCN) will advance the standardization and adoption of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for research facilities and instruments nationally. PIDs are widely seen as foundational to open science in that PIDs uniquely identify various entities in the research ecosystem. While many categories of PIDs have come a long way in terms of standardization and adoption (examples: DOIs for publications, ORCIDs for researchers), this project is focused on the need to advance the standardization and adoption of PIDs for other categories of entities in the research ecosystem which have not progressed as far, namely for research facilities and instruments. The scientific communities which this RCN will support include the biomedical sciences, the geosciences, informatics, and many or most other scientific fields which utilize specialized facilities and equipment in the research process. While persistent identifiers are already being assigned to facilities and research equipment in a few limited cases, significantly more community adoption and standardization is needed to address the entire research ecosystem. This project builds on activities already being undertaken such as RRIDs (Research Resource Identifiers), and will convene a series of workshops and stakeholder engagements to better understand the field and current practice, develop principles of design for new PIDs, and work to generalize these principles toward practical application, thereby aiming to achieve tangible outcomes for open science. This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Directorate for Geosciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.