The persistent identifier ecosystem

RDA’s 27th Plenary meets in London Oct 6-8, 2026, hosted by UKRI — piloting a new cadence pairing yearly virtual and in-person meetings.

ROR’s March 2026 recap of its Annual Community Meeting reports that nearly 20% of the 8,000+ organization records added in 2025 are in East Asia, and confirms ‘single search’ becomes ROR’s default affiliation-matching strategy in 2026. A separate, unrelated ROR post the same month marks the registry’s 7th anniversary with a POSI commitment update.

ARC’s 5-goal PID Action Plan — DOIs on grants, ROR on institutions, ORCID on personnel, plus a FAIR data policy — is due complete by end of 2026.

ORCID has published ORCID 2030: Advancing the Future of Research, its strategic plan for 2026-2029, built around five themes: empowering researchers, connecting research information, broadening its community, advancing trust and integrity, and strengthening its own resiliency. Here’s what the plan actually says and what it signals for research administrators.

Software Heritage marked 10 years in Jan 2026, gained UNESCO/DPGA digital-public-good status, and struck a Sovereign Tech Agency archival partnership.

Duke University Libraries has completed migrating its Research Data Repository from the Hyrax/Samvera stack to TIND RDM, a platform built by CERN spinoff TIND, adding a submission dashboard, dataset versioning with new DOIs per version, file preview, and expanded ORCID/ROR support while preserving existing DOI resolution.

OpenAlex now ingests DataCite’s funder and grant metadata daily, part of a $3.6M Wellcome grant to build open funding infrastructure.

In June 2026, Cambia sold The Lens to a new Australian non-profit under SPIE. Here’s what changes, and what does not, for Lens.org researchers.

ResearchGate retired the opaque RG Score around 2022 for the Research Interest (RI) Score, a formula weighting citations, recommendations, and reads.

Crossref’s 2026 public data file shows ROR IDs up 250% and grant-identifier links reaching 50,000 records, alongside its first Latin America Metadata Sprint.

Denmark’s NORA research portal moved from DTU to Statistics Denmark in Jan. 2026, ahead of a reported consolidated, open-architecture database later in 2026.

ROR retired version 1 of its API and metadata schema in December 2025. Here is the actual timeline, what changed in schema v2, and what to check if your institution has any ROR-consuming integration.

Norway retired Cristin during 2025 in favor of NVA (Nasjonalt vitenarkiv, the Norwegian Research Information Repository), a single national system operated by Sikt that also absorbed 60-plus institutional repositories, including BORA. Here is what changed for researchers and administrators.

Crossref has published its first position paper, arguing that national and international PID policy focused narrowly on identifiers misses what actually makes research infrastructure work: open linked metadata and sustainably governed organisations. The paper offers five recommendations for policymakers and draws worked examples from the UK, Portugal, Canada and South Africa.

ORCID and China’s CSTR Identification Platform signed an MOU on July 16, 2026 to pursue interoperability between their persistent identifier systems. No technical implementation details have been published yet; here’s what the agreement covers and why CRIS and research-administration teams working with Chinese research partners should watch it.

ARC’s updated Open Access Policy took effect 1 July 2026: immediate OA for articles, a 12-month window for books, and new Indigenous research provisions.

Federal agencies now require ORCID as a digital persistent identifier; universities are setting their own 2026 linkage deadlines ahead of enforcement.

NIH’s Common Forms leniency period ended May 8, 2026: eRA now blocks SciENcv biosketch/support submissions with unlinked ORCID or eRA Commons.

The PID quartet that anchors modern research metadata: how ORCID, ROR, RAiD, and DOIs interlock in 2026, and what’s still broken at the crosswalk layer.

ORCID’s 4.0 IDR refresh tightens the contributor-affiliation-funding crosswalk. A walkthrough of what changes for CASRAI integrations and what publishers should do now.