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With a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant award, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences, will lead the effort to contribute a new component of the ecosystem of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reproducible) data services and tools using a system called Research Activity Identifier (RAiD).

“SDSC will serve as the inaugural registration authority for the U.S. RAiD service, which will provide researchers, funders, institutions and other stakeholders with a way to assign globally unique, persistent resolvable identifiers (GUPRIs) with corresponding metadata for specific projects or portfolios,” said Christine Kirkpatrick, director of Research Data Services at SDSC  who is the project lead. “This is especially helpful for long-term discovery, resolution, access, sharing, reporting and impact assessment of the researchers, resources, funding and associated outputs of projects with multiple stakeholders over time.”

Kirkpatrick said that RAiDs, which follow international standards, provide a transparent and reliable way to centralize and preserve vital project information—even after a project ends. Specifically, RAiD addresses the challenges of repetitive manual data entry and alleviates the administrative burden for researchers by simplifying tasks such as preparing funding applications, managing project collaborations and generating reports. Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are key to implementing some of the FAIR principles during these activities and also support new data architectures such as knowledge graphs to be more precise with context for AI readiness. Several countries have adopted national PID strategies and the U.S. has an interagency working group currently working on a national strategy.

“RAiD represents a missing piece needed for a successful PID strategy—giving stakeholders a way to find and collect information about projects—the predominant way science is organized across institutional boundaries and across different funding grants and investigators,” Kirkpatrick said.

"One challenge with persistent identifiers has been linking them together to better map research activities and outputs,” said Chris Erdmann, who is on the Advisory Group for RAiD, part of SDSC's Data Initiatives and the GO FAIR U.S. Office and Director of Open Science at SciLifeLab. “RAiD makes this easier—helping us track open science indicators and gain a clearer picture of networks and global collaboration.”

The SDSC-led effort includes developing a hosted cloud service, a web application and an API (application programming interface) for issuing RAiDs—alongside creating a sustainable business model to support the service.

“Although RAiD is already in use internationally, U.S. institutions currently lack access—despite growing interest from a range of stakeholders—including universities, research funders and organizations like the Center for Open Science,” said Sheila Rabun, senior strategist of Research Infrastructure Programs at Lyrasis and partner on the project. “This pilot initiative to integrate RAiD into the U.S. research ecosystem will establish working relationships to enhance efficiency, improve collaboration and ensure the long-term preservation of critical research data.”

SDSC will partner with Lyrasis, a non-profit organization that is the organizational home for the ORCID U.S. community consortium, as well as the DataCite consortium – the method used by over 200 U.S. institutions in assigning digital object identifers (DOIs) and additional services.

RAiD was created by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Australia’s leading research data infrastructure facility enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

The project is jointly funded by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (award no. 2434407).