Persistent identifiers for research facilities and instruments: Insights and Recommendations

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are a central component of open science goals. PIDs like Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) provide a mechanism to name, distribute, link to, and track data sets, people, institutions, facilities, instruments, and other research objects over time. This presentation will outline insights and lessons learned through a NSF-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) project focused on building recommendations for assigning PIDs to research facilities and instruments. Persistent identification of facilities and instruments has promise to increase the transparency and replicability of scientific research, and to enable easier tracking of the uses and impacts of particular research tools.

With each new application of PID, however, a common set of questions emerges. In the case of assigning PIDs to research facilities and instruments, questions exist related to assigning PIDs to successive versions of instrument, the granularity at which PIDs are assigned to complex instrumentation, and what the long-term implications are of assigning PIDs to relatively short-lived facilities. In this talk, we draw from the community input into our RCN project, to address the following issues: 1) what key use cases are driving interest in PIDs for facilities and instruments, 2) what are the capabilities of the PID types (RRID, DOI, etc) and how do they fit the use cases, and 3) what are initial recommendations on good practices for assigning PIDs for facilities and instruments? The goal of this presentation is to stimulate cross-community interactions and share lessons learned.