Piloting the use of RAiD in Research.fi

Research.fi is a national service for collecting, integrating and disseminating information on research conducted in Finland. This includes information on publications and related research outputs (including in the arts), datasets, funding decisions and research infrastructures. It has a specific section for researcher profiles, focusing on researcher descriptions, their research activities, merits, education - moving towards an affiliation-independent research CV. The plan is that within the Research.fi service, projects will become entities that bind different research objects together, even when funded from multiple sources and involving various researchers and organizations that may change over time. This concept of a project is aligned with the definition of a project in RAiD - the Research Activity Identifier. The RAiD service, developed originally by the Australian Research Data Commons, is being rolled out and adapted to the European context. RAiD provides a persistent and globally unique identifier that resolves in a browser to standardized information about a particular research project. Minting persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research projects facilitates the management of information about related participants, organizations, resources, and outputs. RAiD does so primarily by collecting other PIDs (where possible) representing project components, plus descriptive information about the project, storing it all in a metadata record associated with the identifier. This paper documents and discusses the implementation of RAiD in Europe and piloting its use in the national Finnish service context.