NISO Working Group To Develop US PID Strategy

Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to develop an ANSI/NISO standard for a United States national PID strategy, which will increase the adoption of PIDs and provide critical support to open research. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community, including representatives from federal agencies, PID providers, academic libraries, publishers, and software providers, to join the resulting Working Group.  

Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are a critical part of the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. They 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. To date, however, approaches to encouraging the adoption of PIDs and investment in PID infrastructure have not been coordinated, and there is little guidance available on how best to improve the implementation and efficacy of PIDs within the diverse spheres of the US research landscape.

The Open Research Funders Group, building on work first begun by the Research Data Alliance, released a report, “Developing a US National PID Strategy,” in the spring of 2024. The report highlighted the need for a strategy that would build support for PIDs, increase their adoption, and help stakeholders to incorporate them into workflows and systems more easily. NISO’s Working Group will be dedicated to meeting these needs, developing a standard advancing PIDs and open scholarship. It will outline the benefits of PIDs, define desirable characteristics of shared PID systems, offer strategies for evaluating and adopting PID infrastructure, and identify gaps in current systems that call for the development of new identifiers. The standard will benefit stakeholders across the research ecosystem by streamlining interactions, reducing redundant efforts, and offering clear guidance for adopting PIDs.

“The move toward open research, driven in part in the US by governmental mandates like the Nelson Memo, makes it more important than ever to make it easier for organizations, institutions, and researchers to adopt persistent identifiers,” says Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Executive Director. “The formation of the Working Group is an important step in achieving this goal and supporting open scholarship.”

For more information and to volunteer to join the US National PID Strategy Working Group, please contact nisohq@niso.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.