EAGER: Assessing Project Impact and Building PID Infrastructure: Bootstrapping RAiD for the US Research Community

Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) is a new digital persistent identifier (PID) specifically for research projects and activities, developed by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). RAiD provides unique, digital persistent identifiers with corresponding metadata for research projects. This is especially helpful for long-term discovery, resolution, access, sharing, reporting and tracking of the researchers, resources, funding, and associated outputs of projects with multiple stakeholders over time. Based on international standards and guidelines, RAiD provides a transparent, visible, and reliable collection point for often overlooked or lost project information, even after closure, and helps to alleviate the administrative burden of risk-prone and repetitive manual entry of extensive data by multiple researchers when preparing research applications, submissions, funding requests, subproject allocations, project collaborations, and research reports. Currently there is no way for institutions in the United States to use RAiD, although interest has been expressed by stakeholders across the research ecosystem, including the Center for Open Science, health research funders, universities, cyberinfrastructure providers, multi-institution research projects, and individual researchers. This effort facilitates development of cyberinfrastructure for a hosted cloud service for a US Research Activity Identifier registration agency, a web application and API for minting RAiDs, and a business model and process for providing a RAiD service point for US-based entities. It builds upon and leverages existing expertise and resources at an NSF-funded advanced computing center, a national research data organization, and a robust nonprofit already providing PID infrastructure services for institutional members of ORCID and DataCite in the US. This award is jointly funded by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.