2026-10-27 –, Naturalis 01
As PIDs become essential infrastructure for open research, funder compliance, and scholarly discovery, shared standards are more important than ever. In this session, you will learn how a National Information Standards Organization working group is turning community best practices into a consensus U.S. standard designed for global interoperability, for which many key systems are already largely compliant. This session offers a practical look at the core attributes of robust PIDs and PID systems—uniqueness, persistence, resolution, metadata, interoperability, governance, sustainability, security, and integrity—and the objective criteria behind them. You’ll get insight into the standards development process, leave with a clearer understanding of how these characteristics balance moving the field forward with real-world implementation, and learn how this emerging standard can help PID providers and users alike evaluate, strengthen, and future-proof this critical research infrastructure.
What makes a persistent identifier truly trustworthy and long-lasting? In this session, you’ll learn about the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) PID working group’s effort to develop a standard that defines the characteristics of PIDs and PID systems used in scholarly communication and research.
PIDs have evolved from helpful tools to essential research infrastructure, underpinning discovery, transparency, and accountability across the global scholarly ecosystem. In the United States, broad community adoption, combined with increasing federal funder requirements, has created a need for shared guidance and clear, consistent standards. Because PID systems have matured into more common research infrastructure, the group has been able to develop a standard based on the collected experience of PID providers and users.
You’ll discover how this effort builds on foundational work from the Research Data Alliance National PID Strategies Interest Group, the U.S.-focused national PID strategy report organized by the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) subcommittee on identification report, among other documents. Together, these efforts aim to ensure that PIDs are reliable, interoperable, and durable components of the research enterprise.
After this session, you’ll have:
- A set of normative characteristics for PIDs being used in scholarly communication and research.
- An understanding about the community process that went into developing this NISO standard.
- Ideas for how you might use these characteristics in developing and using PID systems.
John Chodacki is Director of the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at California Digital Library (CDL). As UC3 Director, John works across the UC campuses and the broader community to ensure that CDL’s digital curation services meet the emerging needs of the scholarly community – including digital preservation, persistent identifiers, data management, and data publishing. Prior to CDL, John oversaw product development activities at publishing organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Safari Books Online, and PLOS. He has served on the board and/or steering committees of DataCite, Crossref, FORCE11, ROR (Research Organization Registry), COUNTER, Collaborative Knowledge (Coko) Foundation, Open Citations, Metadata 20/20, Make Data Count (MDC), Collaborative Metadata Enrichment (COMET), RDA-US, and The Carpentries.
Jonathan Clark is the Managing Agent for the DOI Foundation which is a not-for-profit membership organisation that manages the DOI System and is the registration authority for the ISO standard (ISO 26324).
Jonathan is one of the co-chairs of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group on Persistent Identifiers. When not doing something PID related, he works as an independent advisor on strategy and innovation. He is also a Guest Lecturer and External Examiner for two MBA programmes in the Netherlands. Prior to this Jonathan worked at Elsevier for 20 years in various positions in publishing, marketing and technology, and before that Shell Research. He holds a BSc and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jonathan was Chair and Director of the DOI Foundation from 2004-2010. He lives mostly in Croatia.