PIDfest 26

As the understanding of PIDs has grown – the community – institutions, funders, policy-makers – are looking beyond identifying objects, to realise the systemic value of a connected PID ecosystem. The lion's share of the value of DOIs, ORCIDs, ROR IDs, etc. lies in the relationship metadata illuminating how the identified objects relate to each other. The possibilities to make connections between entities across the system, especially where information about the relationships is included and open, promise opportunities for greater insights, evaluation, and so - more strategic decisions and better informed policy.

In this session, speakers will report recent developments in improving metadata capture and availability across the scholarly ecosystem and open the floor for participants' input on opportunities to further boost the coverage of open metadata for research objects.

Research funders are under growing pressure to demonstrate the impact and reach of their portfolios, but doing so requires being able to connect grants to outputs reliably and at scale. Persistent identifiers are the connective tissue that makes this possible: Grant IDs, ORCIDs, RORs, and output IDs allow funders to link funded projects to who does the work, at which institution, and what it produces. In this workshop, representatives from ZonMw and NWO share their practical experiences implementing PID strategies, including what was difficult, what worked as expected, and what surprised them. This is followed by an OpenAlex demonstration that provides context on how open reporting systems use PIDs (or work around their absence) to create funder-level insights. The session is grounded in real implementation and invites participants to reflect on the funder's role in the broader PID ecosystem.