DOE OSTI provides PID services to increase the discoverability of DOE-funded research results, link research components, and better understand the impact of DOE's research funding. The power of using PIDs is creating connections to entities throughout the research lifecycle – connecting researchers to awards to organizations to research outputs.

Using PIDs to create connections and relationships between research components allows organizations to create visualizations to understand the impact of funding, the reach of research efforts, and perform portfolio analysis.

To learn more about using persistent identifiers, visit:

• Connecting Persistent Identifiers
• Impact of Persistent Identifiers
• Persistent Identifier Data Sources

What is a Persistent Identifier (PID)?

A persistent identifier (PID) is a digital identifier that is globally unique, persistent, machine resolvable, has an associated metadata schema, identifies an entity (e.g. person, researcher, publication, award, organization, or research output), and is frequently used to disambiguate between entities.

PIDs are long-lasting, managed, and registered unique digital references (often in the form of a URL) to an object that can be represented or described online.

The identifier is a string of numbers, letters, and and/or symbols assigned to the digital object.

Types of PIDs

• PIDs for research outputs
  • An identifier assigned to a meaningful result of the research process, such as journal articles, data, software, reports, etc.
  • Digital object identifiers (DOIs) are the most commonly used PID for research outputs, whether the output is physical, digital, or abstract.
• PIDs for people
  • An identifier assigned to an individual person that disambiguates them from others.
  • ORCID iDs are the most commonly used PID used for individuals and enables researcher disambiguation.
  • ORCID iDs are commonly used by researchers, scientists, and authors to uniquely identify themselves and to create an online CV that can be used and integrated into various research workflows and systems.
• PIDs for organizations
  • An identifier assigned to organizations; in the research landscape – funders, universities, research institutions, government agencies, and publishers.
  • Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs are a commonly used PIDs for organizations in the research area that include descriptive information about that organization.
• PIDs for awards
  • An identifier assigned to awards, contracts, grants, facility use, etc.
  • Award/grant DOIs are the PID used for awards. Award DOIs can help better enable acknowledgement and tracking of the award.
• PIDs for samples
  • An identifier assigned to physical or material samples, or to a feature-of-interest (the real-world feature that the sample is taken from). They are not used for digital representations of the sample.
  • An International Generic Sample Number (IGSN) ID is the PID used for samples. IGSN IDs are DOIs assigned by DataCite to enable connections between research activities and the physical objects associated with them.

Benefits of PIDs

Assigning and using PIDs provides great benefits to the broad research community. PIDs can:

• Enable greater discovery and reuse through unique identification and broader dissemination.
• Provide appropriate credit through citation and uniquely identifying contributors and organizations.
• Increase access by providing a persistent, resolvable link to the entity and descriptive metadata.
• Improve trust through transparent metadata and provenance and verification of entities.
• Increase interoperability through resolvable links and robust metadata.
• Facilitate impact and evaluation through linked PIDs within associated metadata.