2026-10-28 –, Naturalis 01
If you’re building a persistent identifier program from the ground up, you may be wondering what real indicators of success look like. In this session, you’ll learn how to launch and scale a PIDs initiative in a decentralized environment. Using Waterloo’s pilot as a case study, you’ll see how targeted affiliation assertions for PhD students and postdocs led to stronger trust in graduate research impact, streamlined reporting, and created a growing campus‑wide momentum. You’ll take away practical success metrics, communication strategies, partnership‑building approaches, and scalable next steps to help your PID work keep knowledge connected across people and systems.
Do you need help defining what clear indicators of success look like when building a persistent identifier program from the ground up at your institution? In this session, you’ll see how you can launch a PID, such as ORCID, in a decentralized environment, prove value early, and scale with confidence. You’ll hear about the specific and practical actions, metrics, and governance engagements that turned a pilot into a campus‑wide plan. At Waterloo we started with a targeted goal of researcher affiliation assertions for PhD students and postdocs, engaging with our Graduate Office, to boost trust in graduate research impact and streamline reporting. What we ended up with was significant campus engagement and momentum toward building a PIDs engaged ecosystem; that is leveraging the success of a limited pilot to form systemic change.
You’ll learn what to track, how to communicate, and where most teams get stuck. You’ll also see how to expand your success by building readiness to launch partnerships through engagement and outreach and technical readiness. The goal is that you learn to communicate how your PID work keeps knowledge connected across people and systems.
After this session, you will: Have a starter set of success indicators that can be applied to your own PIDs projects; See practical examples of how asserting affiliation and connecting PID data supports research impact and reporting; Take away strategies for expanding implementation, building trust, and forming partnerships that support governance, sustainability, and long‑term integration; Be able to anticipate and overcome common barriers and plan scalable next steps.
Laura Bredahl is the Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian at the University of Waterloo Library. She leads initiatives related to researcher identity management, persistent identifiers, and open scholarship. Laura has collaborated with campus partners to advance ORCID adoption and integrate PIDs into institutional workflows. Her work focuses on building sustainable systems that support research visibility and compliance while promoting open science principles.