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On May 14, 2025, organizers from Lyrasis, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), GO FAIR US, and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), hosted the first call for initial stakeholders interested in participating in the US RAiD Pilot, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Award #2434407). With an initial group of 40 attendees representing 22 organizations from different stakeholder perspectives, the group explored the benefits of using RAiD to manage information about research projects, activities planned for the US RAiD pilot that is scheduled to run through December 2026, examples of potential RAiD use cases, and logistics for pilot participation. 

Organizations interested in participating in the RAiD pilot are invited to submit their initial ideas for using RAiD through the US RAiD Pilot Use Case Submission Form. A lively discussion followed the 30 minute presentation that was recorded and made available on YouTube: US RAiD Pilot Initial Stakeholders Call #1 (May 14, 2025). A summary of the presentation and discussion points can be found below. To stay in the loop with future US RAiD developments, please sign up for the US RAiD Pilot listserv.

Intro to RAiD

RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) is a global system to uniquely identify research projects and serves as a registry of information about research projects, created by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). RAiD was established in 2022 as an ISO standard for persistently identifying and registering research projects. While persistent identifiers (PIDs) already existed for people (ORCID), research outputs (DOIs), research organizations (ROR), and other entities across the global research and scholarly communication ecosystem, prior to 2022 there was a gap in the ability to uniquely identify and track research projects in an interoperable and standardized way, and RAiD was created to fill that gap. Most research happens in the context of a research project, regardless of discipline, level of collaboration, grant funding, etc. RAiD acts to tie together these other PIDs representing different research activities and entities connected with a project into an intelligible record for both humans and machines. 

RAiD is specifically designed to support the dynamic nature of research projects: researchers and partner organisations may join or leave the project, project names may change, outputs are created over time, etc. RAiD tracks these changes and allows for a snapshot of the state of a project at a particular point in time. While RAiD is a persistent identifier, it is also a global registry of research projects, with capabilities taylored to specifically to projects, including:

  • Project-specific metadata — Uses a metadata schema specifically designed for research projects
  • Dynamic, automatically versioned metadata record — RAiDs are dynamic and designed to evolve as a project changes and matures. Version control is automated, for example, so that all changes to a RAiD are available at any time
  • Multi-user editing environment with access control — Collaborative editing of RAiD metadata, with appropriate access controls, allowing researchers or research support staff to create and edit RAiDs
  • Automatically generated landing pages — Automatic generation of standardised landing pages, obviating the need for organisations to build and host landing pages
  • Extensible metadata — Allows customisation and extension of that metadata schema for various domains or constituencies by RAiD Registration Agencies, while maintaining a stable core of metadata and coordinating any local adaptations
  • Support and development within a global RAiD community — Has a growing global user community developing good practice around project identification and description.

US RAiD Pilot Overview

In the United States, Lyrasis is partnering with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to lead a US RAiD Pilot, with funding from the National Science Foundation (see announcement). In the first year of the pilot (2025), as a designated Registration Agency for RAiD in the US, the SDSC will be establishing US RAiD registration infrastructure Application Programming Interface (API) available to US organizations and generating related user documentation in collaboration with Lyrasis and the ARDC. The pilot team will gather and document initial use cases, and work with participating pilot organizations to test and refine the technical infrastructure. As use cases are gathered and tested, results and insights will be shared with the wider community of potentially interested organizations, research groups, software service providers, and others continuing into the second year of the pilot (2026) where the team will further refine workflows and documentation, organize additional webinars and resources for broader engagement, and ultimately determine a sustainable business model for RAiD in the US beyond the grant-funded pilot period.

Lyrasis manages two national community programs for PIDs in the US: the ORCID US Community for non-profit ORCID member organizations in the US, and the Lyrasis DataCite US Community, for US organizations wishing to assign DOIs to their local materials. Both programs were created to bolster a community of practice around PIDs in the US and lower the barrier of participation in PID best practices with cost sharing and dedicated support. The ORCID consortium model uses a tiered fee structure based on the total annual operating budget of each organization, while the DataCite consortium model offers tiered pricing based on the total number of DOIs registered by each organization annually. These existing programs provide two examples of potential business models for RAiD in the US after the pilot period ends, and the pilot team will work collaboratively with pilot organizations to consider additional options as well.

RAiD Use Case Examples

Some examples of use cases where RAiD could be helpful include:

Research Lab Head Use Case: Metabolomics Workbench

Dr. Shankar Subarmanium, distinguished Professor of Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Cellular & Molecular Medicine, and Nanoengineering, and Chair in Bioengineering and Systems Biology at the University of California San Diego, leads a very large lab and many projects in the metabolomics space in collaboration with groups spanning beyond UC San Diego. One of those is a national metabolomics data resource, known as the Metabolomics Workbench, which creates outputs and accepts data deposits that are often cited in research publications. To help Dr. Subarmanium and his collaborators better understand and assess the full spectrum of research activity related to the Metabolomics Workbench, RAiD could be used to tie all of the relevant people, organizations, funding, outputs, and related resources together.

Funder Use Case: National Science Foundation (NSF)

As a program officer for NSF, Dr. Plato Smith, manages a portfolio of NSF-funded projects under the FAIR, Open Science, Public Access umbrella. Due to the large scale and often collaborative nature of the many projects that Dr. Smith manages from the funding side, RAiD could be helpful in collecting information around the many outputs related to various project portfolios. For example, when publications, presentations, and other activities that might not make it into official reports are referenced in a RAiD, or contain a RAiD in their metadata record, time and energy can be saved.

Research Infrastructure Use Case: Open Storage Network (OSN)

Christine Kirkpatrick, Division Director for Research Data Services at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and principles investigator in the US RAiD Pilot project is involved in the Open Storage Network (OSN), which provides a cyberinfrastructure (CI) service to address specific data storage, transfer, sharing, and access challenges across a network of multiple research universities. OSN produces research materials and also serves as a resource and basis for additional research. As a grant-funded initiative, it is critical that the OSN is able to collect data to illustrate the full impact of OSN services on the research community. Similarly, SciLifeLab in Sweden is exploring a similar scenario to OSN’s. 

National Research Repository Use case from Finland: Research.fi Implementation of RAiD

As an international standard for research projects, RAiD can be used by countries across the globe to gain a better understanding of the research activities and outputs at a national, regional, and organizational level. RAiD adoption is also underway in Australia, as well as the European Union, where the ARDC is currently partnering with SURF in the Netherlands to pilot RAiD services. In Finland, the Ministry of Education and Culture has also been piloting RAiD for their Research.fi service, which collects and shares information on research conducted in Finland. Launched in 2020, the service contains information on publications associated with Finnish organizations, funded projects, researchers operating in Finland and their research activities, and statistical information on the development of research resources and impact. The service aims to use RAiD to “bind different research objects together, even when funded from multiple sources and involving various researchers and organizations that may change over time” (Piloting the use of RAiD in Research.fi Abstract).

What is involved for initial pilot organizations?

Organizations that lead or provide resources and facilities for projects, support projects with software service provision, repository services, or related workflows such as funding and publishing, are encouraged to consider potential use cases for RAiD and submit their initial ideas through the US RAiD Pilot Use Case Submission Form as soon as possible. The US RAiD Pilot team will facilitate the documentation of these use cases as they move through testing and share results with the broader community.

RAiD registration relies on the RAiD API (Application Programming Interface), which can be integrated directly into software systems and powers a GUI (Graphical User Interface) where users can enter RAiD metadata through a webform. Pilot participants will be asked to test these mechanisms and provide feedback on the infrastructure and metadata schema, workflows and documentation, as well as business model considerations.

Questions & Discussion

Are there costs to participate in the pilot, and would pilot organizations be committed to pay future membership fees?

  • Participation in the pilot is at no cost to participating organizations, thanks for grant funding from the National Science Foundation. Pilot organizations are not required to continue using RAiD after the pilot period. However, in order to ensure that RAiD services are accessible and sustainable, organizations wishing to continue use of RAiD beyond the pilot period will need to contribute within the business model that will be determined over the course of the pilot.

Where can I find more documentation about RAiD and technical documentation for adding RAiD to the Swagger API? 

Are RAiDs dynamic? What does “dynamic metadata” mean?

  • Yes, RAiD metadata is dynamic, meaning that there is flexibility in what properties can be included in RAiD metadata records. As changes are made to the metadata, new information is appended, rather than over-written. Versioning takes place in the background, so you can see the changes over the course of a project and different snapshots of the project in time. The documentation at metadata.raid.org shows that RAiD metadata is divided into 3 sections: Core, Extended, and Local. The extended metadata properties can have different controlled lists across different Registration Agencies, and Local properties are entirely at the discretion of the Registration Agency to meet the needs of their constituents This is something that we will be working on during the pilot. So if there are properties that you need that are not already in the metadata schema, please let us know.

Where will RAiD be placed within a publication or other output?

  • This is to be determined by working with publication use cases over the course of the pilot.

Will RAiD prefixes be affiliated with organizations like DOIs?

  • RAiD uses completely opaque identifiers, so there's no information encoded into a RAiD. You would need to interrogate the metadata to get that information.

With contributor role as an element of RAID metadata, is the community tending to use the CRediT taxonomy there?

  • Yes, RAiD and other PIDs like ORCID use CRediT to indicate roles. There is also an “administrative position” vocabulary that RAiD maintains as a separate property.

How does the RAiD schema interface with research objects that don't have DOIs, ARKs, handles, or other "typical" digital identifiers?

  • The use of PIDs is encouraged wherever possible, but there are fallbacks, e.g., “alternate identifier” where you can put in an accession or project number (and specify what it is). You can also take an archive.org snapshot of a website and attach that, for non-traditional research objects or grants with no PID, etc. The allowlist is documented at: https://metadata.raid.org/en/latest/core/relatedObjects.html#relatedobject-schemauri

Who is the appropriate creator of a RAiD? If a project has multiple organizations/stakeholders involved, which stakeholder should be the one to create the RAiD at the beginning? (Note that multiple stakeholders can contribute to RAiD metadata once the RAiD has been minted.)

  • Guidelines around who should be the creator of a RAiD can be set by policy of the registration agency. ARDC & SURF’s approach = your research organization owns the RAiD. For example, orgs in Australia sign a lightweight agreement with ARDC, promising to keep the RAiD accurate and up to date. And then the organization decides whether to manage the RAiD workflows centrally or have someone in the research office of the library do it, or delegate this to researchers. The system is flexible enough to allow any of those approaches. We will explore this concept in the US over the course of the RAiD pilot. Some questions to ask while determining who should mint a RAiD: 
    • Who is the authority on the project? 
    • Who is best placed to maintain metadata related to that project?

If you are unsure whether your organization should be the creator of a RAiD, please let us know what use case you are questioning, and we can work together to consider the options: US RAiD Pilot Use Case Submission Form

Is there a deadline for submitting Use Cases?

  • Currently, there is not a deadline, but we encourage submission as soon as possible so we can get started working with you. We will accept submissions on a rolling basis. Once you submit your use case(s), we can work with you directly. Otherwise, we will be sending general updates out to the US RAiD listserv. Please submit your ideas even if you are unsure and we can help you determine whether RAiD makes sense in your context: US RAiD Pilot Use Case Submission Form.

For more information about the US RAiD Pilot, please contact Sheila Rabun at sheila.rabun@lyrasis.org.