RDA-US and NISO to Collaborate on US National PID Strategy
The Research Data Alliance-United States (RDA-US) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced today their intent to collaborate in the development of an ANSI/NISO standard for a US national Persistent Identifier (PID) strategy. The Working Group formed to achieve this goal will operate within NISO’s standards development structure.
Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are critical to the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. PIDs support research discovery and citations, allow users and systems to easily identify authors and institutions and link them to research outputs, and help ensure compliance with a growing number of government and funder mandates advancing open scholarship. The Open Research Funders Group, building on work first addressed in the Research Data Alliance, released the report “Developing a US National PID Strategy” in March 2024. The report highlighted the need for a strategy to build support for PIDs, increase their adoption, and help stakeholders incorporate them into workflows and systems more easily. Engaging with the principles addressed in the report while also further developing other elements, this Working Group will create a standard for advancing PIDs and open scholarship.
The RDA-US office will provide expertise on the benefits of PIDs and shared PID systems while also sharing insights on strategies for implementing PID infrastructure within the broader data community. It will also support further engagement by RDA-US members in the Working Group’s ongoing projects, initiatives, and events to ensure diversity and balance stakeholder engagement. In turn, NISO will administer the Group’s operations and liaise with all members, including representatives and individuals within the RDA-US community.
“RDA-US is pleased to partner with NISO on the development of an ANSI/NISO standard for a US PID strategy”, said Beth Plale, RDA-US Executive Director. “RDA-US has endorsed the US-based PID strategy standard precisely because it accounts for the nuances of the US research ecosystem, so we expect this working group to produce a result that is quite helpful as guidance for the community.”
“We are excited to announce this collaboration with RDA-US,” added Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “Their guidance will be invaluable to the Working Group as it progresses this important project supporting open research.”
About RDA-US
The Research Data Alliance – United States (RDA-US) was instrumental in the founding, development, and support of the global Research Data Alliance.It is dedicated to strong community connections, global solutions to benefit our region and beyond, advancing research and education in open science, and facilitating working groups supporting RDA and RDA-US goals. RDA-US is based at Indiana University in the Pervasive Technology Institute and fosters a national community through its programmatic activity and steering committee. For more information, visit the RDA-US website (https://rda-us.org) or contact us at rda-us@rda-alliance.org.
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.