Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
The UK PID consortium ecosystem (Jisc for ORCID; British Library for DataCite).
- Is an instance
An umbrella national PID coordinating body advising on adoption.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A single university's local PID minting service is not a PID consortium.
- Not an instance
A vendor's customer advisory board is not a PID consortium.
- Not an instance
A single institution's individual ORCID or DataCite membership, held directly rather than through a national lead organisation, is not itself a consortium.
Editorial commentary
PID consortia let countries adopt PID infrastructure cost-effectively and develop local policy and training capacity. The pattern is best developed for ORCID (national consortia leads such as Jisc, CRKN, DEFF) and DataCite (national consortia leads such as TIB and the British Library). PID consortia also coordinate national PID strategies — for example the UK’s National PID Strategy and the Australian Research Data Commons PID strategy work — and act as collective voices to PID providers on community priorities.
What a consortium lead organisation actually does
A consortium lead typically negotiates a single membership contract with the PID provider (ORCID or DataCite) covering all participating institutions, distributes cost across members (usually far cheaper per institution than individual membership), runs local training, onboarding, and technical support, and represents member institutions’ priorities back to the provider’s community/roadmap process. Examples of national leads include Jisc (UK, ORCID), CRKN (Canada), DEFF (Denmark), TIB — Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (Germany, DataCite), and the British Library (UK, DataCite).
Consortium vs. national PID strategy
A PID consortium is an operational/contractual body; a national PID strategy (such as the UK’s, coordinated with Jisc, or Australia’s, coordinated through the Australian Research Data Commons) is the broader policy document setting adoption goals across multiple PID types — ORCID, ROR, RAiD, DOI — that consortia then help implement. A strategy can reference and rely on multiple consortia without being one itself.
References
- Brown J., Demeranville T., Meadows A., ‘Open Persistent Identifier Infrastructures: The Foundation of FAIR’ (ORCID/DataCite/Crossref joint communications).
- Jisc/UKRI, ‘UK National PID Strategy’.
Also known as
Persistent identifier consortium
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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