An Open Ecosystem for Pervasive Use of Persistent Identifiers

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are essential for making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, or FAIR. While the advantages of PIDs for data publication and citation are well understood, and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are increasingly applied to data, there are two gaps in the current identifier ecosystem: 1) services that provide a consistent baseline of capabilities encompassing key aspects of the research data lifecycle, including canonical landing pages and machine-readable metadata via the same URL; and 2) support for identifiers to be applied to ephemeral data, particularly as data move across system boundaries, such as during workflows. To address these gaps, we have implemented the FAIR Research Identifiers service. This service supports multiple identifier providers (ARK, Handle, DOIs via DataCite, etc.) and uses Globus Auth to implement a rich user- and group-based authorization model for identifier creation. This paper summarizes the current identifier ecosystem, presents best-practices recommendations for identifier use, and describes our FAIR Research Identifiers service.