Open Research Infrastructure, Standards, and Persistent Identifiers
What this domain tests
Open Research Infrastructure, Standards and Persistent Identifiers tests how scholarly objects and actors are identified, linked and made interoperable. You need to know the main PID systems, metadata standards and the principles of open, community-governed infrastructure.
Core rules
- DOIs identify publications, datasets and other objects; ORCID identifies people; ROR identifies research organizations; ISNI and Ringgold also identify parties; RAID identifies research activity; IGSN identifies samples.
- PIDs are only useful with metadata and resolution services. The PID graph links works, authors, organizations, funders and datasets.
- Crossref and DataCite are DOI registration agencies with different metadata schemas. OpenAIRE aggregates and enriches metadata; OAI-PMH supports harvesting.
- Open infrastructure should be community-governed, transparent, sustainable, interoperable and preferably open source. SCOSS supports shared infrastructure.
- COUNTER provides consistent usage statistics; DOAJ and DOAR are directories, not repositories.
Worked example
An article has a DOI, each author has an ORCID, and the institution has a ROR ID. Reasoning: these PIDs let systems disambiguate authors and affiliations and link the article to the organization. A free-text affiliation alone would create false matches. Adding funder identifiers and dataset DOIs strengthens the graph, but only if the metadata is deposited with the identifiers.
Traps
Treating a DOI as a quality badge; confusing ORCID with a repository; assuming ROR covers funders; thinking PIDs work without metadata; and calling any platform open infrastructure without governance and sustainability checks.