Persistent identifiers in 2026: ORCID + ROR +…

By 2026 the persistent-identifier (PID) layer of scholarly infrastructure has stabilised into a quartet: ORCID for people, ROR for organisations, RAiD for projects, and DOI for almost everything else (articles, datasets, software, instruments, samples, preregistrations). Each is operationally distinct, each has its own governance, and the seams between them are where most metadata loss still happens. This post is a tour of the state in early 2026, the integrations that work well, and the crosswalk gaps that institutions and publishers are still grinding through.

ORCID at 2 million+ active iDs and counting

The Open Researcher and Contributor iD is by some distance the most successful PID for people. As of 2026, ORCID reports over 21 million registered iDs with active use across publishing, funding, and institutional workflows. The 2024 integration of CRediT at the ORCID-record level was the missing piece that closed the loop: a contributor’s roles on a specific work can now be carried persistently on their ORCID record, not just in the publisher’s JATS.

The CASRAI-stewarded contribution to ORCID’s data model also added affiliation history with PIDs (ROR for the organisation, RAiD for projects, DOI for grants), which means a complete ORCID record now resolves the four-way join. The ORCID federation page at CASRAI documents the per-country member organisations and the institutional integration patterns; the ORCID implementation page documents the technical integration via the public API and the member API.

What’s still hard with ORCID in 2026

Coverage is uneven by discipline. Life sciences and physics push close to saturation; humanities, education, and applied fields still have large populations who have not registered. Coverage is also uneven by career stage: PIs are nearly universal, postdocs and senior researchers have high coverage, graduate students and undergraduate contributors are sparse. The policy question of whether to require ORCID at submission, mandate it for funding eligibility, or leave it voluntary remains contested; the major medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, Lancet) effectively require it for corresponding authors, the broader landscape does not.

ROR: the organisational identifier that finally worked

The Research Organization Registry launched in 2019 and crossed 100,000 active records around 2023. By 2026 ROR is the default organisational PID across Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, and most institutional CRIS systems. The decision to keep ROR governance light, the data open under CC0, and the IDs free at all volumes has been validated by adoption.

ROR replaced a Babel of organisational identifiers (GRID, ISNI for orgs, ad-hoc Crossref Funder Registry entries, individual database keys at each tool). The integration pattern is clear: every author affiliation should resolve to a ROR ID, and that ID should travel through the metadata to Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, and the institutional repository. Most publishers now require or strongly prefer ROR at submission.

ROR’s main 2025-2026 work has been on hierarchies: capturing the parent/child relationships between research institutions, hospitals, university systems, and consortia in a queryable way. A hospital with an academic affiliation needs both identifiers; a multi-campus university needs the campus-level resolution; an INSERM unit needs both the unit ROR and the parent INSERM ROR.

RAiD: the project-level PID

The Research Activity Identifier is the newest of the quartet and is filling a real gap. A project (a grant, a clinical trial, a multi-institution collaboration, a piece of fieldwork) was for years the orphan of the PID world: it had no canonical identifier, so its outputs (papers, datasets, software, training of students) could not be reliably linked back to it. RAiD, now an ISO standard (ISO 23527:2022) and operated as an open infrastructure with multiple national service providers, fills the gap.

The RAiD model is straightforward: a RAiD record names the project, lists its participants (with ORCID iDs), its institutions (with ROR IDs), its outputs (with DOIs and other PIDs), its funders (with ROR or Funder Registry), its dates, and its status. A funder issues or registers a RAiD on award; the awardees update it as the project evolves; the outputs reference it.

In 2026 RAiD adoption is strongest in Australia (where the ARDC operates a national RAiD service), New Zealand, the UK (where UKRI has integrated RAiD into its funding workflow), and parts of the EU. North American uptake has been slower; NIH’s evolving project-identifier approach overlaps with but is not identical to RAiD, and the harmonisation is still in negotiation.

DOIs across artefact types

The Digital Object Identifier is the workhorse. The interesting story in 2026 is not DOIs for journal articles (a settled problem) but DOIs for everything else.

Data. DataCite issues DOIs for datasets; coverage is high in well-funded disciplines (biology, astronomy, climate, social sciences via ICPSR), lower in others. The FAIR-data push has pulled coverage up.
Software. Software DOIs via Zenodo and via journal-specific archives (e.g., Software Impacts, JOSS) are now standard practice. Citation of software with DOIs is endorsed by the FAIR4RS principles.
Preprints. Every major preprint server issues DOIs; the Crossref preprint relationship metadata links the preprint DOI to the eventual journal-article DOI.
Preregistrations. OSF and AsPredicted issue preregistration DOIs.
Samples. IGSN (International Generic Sample Number) is a specialised PID for physical samples, increasingly issued as a DOI under the DataCite umbrella.
Instruments. The PIDINST initiative is rolling out DOIs for major research instruments, with full metadata about specifications and operators.

The crosswalk layer

The most underrated work in the PID ecosystem is the crosswalk layer: the mappings between identifier systems that make the quartet actually function as a graph. Crossref’s references and relations blocks link DOIs to other DOIs and to other PIDs. DataCite’s relatedIdentifier field plays the same role for datasets. ORCID’s work entries carry DOIs and increasingly RAiDs. ROR records carry relationships to other organisations and to Funder Registry entries.

Where crosswalks fail is at the institutional repository boundary. A paper deposited in a university IR may have a DOI, but the IR record’s author affiliation may not resolve to a ROR ID; the project funding may be in a free-text field rather than a Funder Registry ID; the dataset associated with the paper may have a DOI but no relation to the paper’s DOI declared. The result is a graph with broken edges, which then degrades discovery downstream.

The work to fix this in 2026 is mostly unglamorous metadata QA at the repository and CRIS layer. Several institutional CRIS vendors have shipped “PID completeness” dashboards that flag records with missing or unresolvable identifiers. The OpenAIRE Graph project rolls up the global picture and is the most useful external check.

What we expect to settle by 2027

Three threads are in motion. First, contributor-affiliation provenance: an ORCID record’s affiliation history with PIDs at both ends will become the canonical record, replacing the per-publisher author-affiliation strings that journals still maintain separately. Second, funder-PID standardisation: the Crossref Funder Registry and ROR are converging, with funders that are also research organisations getting unified records. Third, project-PID interop: RAiD, NIH project IDs, and the EU’s HORIZON identifiers are being mapped to allow a single project to be tracked across funder boundaries.

For institutions setting strategy now, the practical priorities are: require ORCID at hire and on every publication; map every internal organisation to ROR; integrate RAiD into the funding-receipt workflow if you have it; and run quarterly QA against your CRIS for missing PIDs. The CRIS guidance at CASRAI walks through the integration patterns by vendor.

References

Meadows et al., Persistent Identifiers: The Building Blocks of the Research Information Infrastructure (Information Services and Use, 2019). Cousijn et al., A data citation roadmap for scholarly data repositories (Scientific Data, 2019). FAIR4RS Working Group, FAIR Principles for Research Software (RDA, 2022). ARDC documentation on RAiD operational service. ROR governance documentation and CC0 data dumps.