The Australian Research Council (ARC) is running out the clock on a five-goal Persistent Identifier (PID) Action Plan, with work that started in 2025 slated for full completion by the end of 2026. The plan is the ARC’s own operational commitment under the broader Australian National Persistent Identifier Strategy, stewarded by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) — and it is one of the more concrete, dated funder-side PID mandates anywhere in the world, alongside the ORCID iD requirements now spreading across major funders (see CASRAI’s 2026 funder ORCID landscape).
The five goals
Per the ARC’s own published plan, the PID Action Plan sets five discrete, checkable goals rather than a single vague identifier mandate:
- Goal 1 — DOIs on ARC grants. Every ARC-funded grant is to carry a Digital Object Identifier, typically minted via Crossref or DataCite, so grants become citable, resolvable, machine-discoverable records rather than line items in an internal database.
- Goal 2 — ROR IDs on Administering Organisations. Every institution applying for or administering an ARC grant is to hold a Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifier, replacing free-text institution names with a disambiguated, resolvable identifier. See CASRAI’s ROR ID registration guide for institutions if your organisation hasn’t registered yet.
- Goal 3 — ORCID on named personnel. All named personnel on an ARC award (not just chief investigators) are to hold an ORCID iD and supply it during the grant’s establishment phase, rather than as an optional add-on late in the lifecycle.
- Goal 4 — Two-way ORCID integration. The ARC’s own Research Management System (RMS) is to write back to ORCID records, not just read from them — so an ARC award appears as an asserted funding/affiliation record on a researcher’s ORCID profile automatically, rather than requiring manual entry.
- Goal 5 — A FAIR Data Policy. The ARC commits to a formal FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data policy of its own, tying the identifier infrastructure in goals 1–4 to actual data findability and reuse outcomes, not just administrative bookkeeping.
Why grant-level DOIs and RAiD are the piece to watch
Goal 1 targets DOIs on grants specifically, but it’s worth being precise about what a grant DOI does and doesn’t cover, because this is exactly the seam where PID federation tends to leak in practice. A Crossref or DataCite grant DOI identifies the funding award as a bibliographic-style record. It is a different thing from a RAiD (Research Activity Identifier), the ARDC-developed, ISO 23527:2022-standardised identifier for the research activity or project itself — the container that links people, organisations, grants, outputs, and equipment together over the life of a project, independent of any single funder’s system. A grant DOI and a RAiD can, and increasingly do, reference each other: a RAiD record can cite the grant DOI, and the grant DOI metadata can carry the RAiD. But the relationship isn’t strictly one-to-one, since a single RAiD-tracked project can span multiple grants (or a single grant can fund multiple discrete activities). CASRAI’s Project ID (RAiD-anchored) entry and the 2026 RAiD adoption update cover this distinction and where RAiD uptake currently stands in more depth. The ARC PID Action Plan does not, as far as its own published text confirms, set a hard RAiD mandate alongside its DOI/ROR/ORCID goals — RAiD’s push in Australia comes primarily through the parallel work of the ARDC and RAiD.org (see CASRAI’s Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) entry) rather than being one of the ARC’s five numbered goals. Anyone tracking Australian PID policy for compliance purposes should treat the ARC plan and the ARDC-led national RAiD rollout as related but formally distinct initiatives, and check the ARC’s own page for any updates to scope.
What “full completion by end of 2026” actually commits to
The ARC’s own materials describe the plan’s work as commencing in 2025 with all five goals expected to be complete by the end of 2026. That is a near-term, funder-internal systems and policy deadline — it covers the ARC’s own grants-management infrastructure (its Research Management System, its application and reporting workflows, its own FAIR data policy), not a mandate that every Australian university retrofit unrelated internal systems on the same timeline. In practice, most of the downstream burden lands on administering organisations and named personnel: institutions need a ROR ID on file, and named investigators and other project personnel need an ORCID iD supplied at the point an award is established, not requested retroactively during final reporting.
The ARC frames the payoff in fairly concrete terms: reduced duplication of research records, improved researcher accountability, better reproducibility, and — notably for anyone tracking research evaluation policy — higher-quality underlying data for any future ARC research evaluation exercise. That last point matters beyond Australia: it’s the same logic driving funder ORCID/ROR requirements globally, where clean, disambiguated identifier data is treated as a precondition for any credible funder-level research assessment, not an optional nicety layered on top.
What research offices should do before the deadline
- Confirm your institution’s ROR ID is registered, current, and being used consistently in ARC applications rather than a free-text institution name (Goal 2).
- Push ORCID collection earlier in the workflow — at award establishment, not final reporting — for every named person on an ARC grant, not just the chief investigator (Goal 3).
- Check ORCID permissions/connections for researchers so the ARC’s RMS can actually write funding assertions back to their ORCID record once Goal 4 infrastructure is live, rather than the connection failing silently at the individual researcher’s end.
- Track how your existing project/activity identifiers (if any, e.g. RAiD) relate to ARC grant DOIs rather than assuming the two are interchangeable, per the distinction above.
Frequently asked questions
Is the ARC PID Action Plan the same thing as the Australian National PID Strategy?
No. The Australian National PID Strategy is the broader, ARDC-stewarded national strategy covering the whole Australian research sector. The ARC PID Action Plan is the ARC’s own funder-specific implementation commitment in support of that national strategy, scoped to ARC grants and the ARC’s internal systems.
Does the ARC PID Action Plan require a RAiD for every ARC grant?
The ARC’s published goals do not list RAiD as one of the five numbered commitments — the plan’s identifier goals are DOI (grants), ROR (administering organisations), and ORCID (personnel), plus a FAIR data policy commitment. RAiD adoption in the Australian sector is being driven primarily through ARDC and RAiD.org rather than as a distinct ARC PID Action Plan goal; check the ARC’s own plan page for the current, authoritative goal list before relying on this distinction for compliance purposes.
What happens if the 2026 deadline slips?
The ARC has not, as far as its own published materials indicate at the time of writing, specified a formal contingency or extension mechanism if any of the five goals aren’t fully met by end of 2026. Research offices should treat the date as the ARC’s stated target and monitor the ARC’s own strategies-and-policies page for any updates, rather than assuming a hard cutoff with defined consequences.
Sources: Australian Research Council, Persistent Identifier (PID) Action Plan; ARDC, Australian National Persistent Identifier (PID) Strategy.
