The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) crossed several adoption thresholds in 2024-2025. ISO 23527:2022 standardisation completed; the Australian Research Data Commons reached operational scale; UKRI integrated RAiD into its funding workflow; the EU’s HORIZON identifier work began aligning with RAiD; the ARDC-led international RAiD Steering Group brought together national service providers from Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, and several EU member states. The May 2026 picture is meaningfully different from the May 2025 picture. This post is an adoption update.
Where RAiD is now
RAiD is operational at substantial scale in Australia, where the ARDC operates the national RAiD service and integration with the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council has matured. Every ARC and NHMRC grant from 2024 onward has a RAiD; the integration is a routine compliance item.
RAiD is operational in New Zealand via a national service implementation aligned with the ARDC model.
RAiD is operational in the UK via a UKRI-operated service, with integration into the Je-S successor (the UKRI Funding Service that launched in 2023). UKRI grants from 2024 onward have RAiDs; backfilling of historical grants is in progress.
RAiD is in pilot in Canada via a CRDCN-led initiative, with the Tri-Agencies (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC) participating in design.
RAiD has affiliated national service providers in the Netherlands, Germany, and Finland; full EU integration is in development through the EOSC Federation work.
RAiD is not yet operational at scale in the US. NIH’s evolving project-identifier work overlaps with but is not identical to RAiD; harmonisation discussions are ongoing.
What RAiD actually carries
A RAiD record carries: the project’s name and description; its participants with ORCID iDs; its institutional affiliations with ROR IDs; its funding sources with Funder Registry or ROR identifiers and grant identifiers; its outputs with DOIs and other PIDs; its temporal span; its status. The record is mutable: as the project evolves, the RAiD record is updated to reflect new participants, new outputs, new affiliations.
The mutability is the design choice that distinguishes RAiD from a per-event identifier like a DOI. A project is a living entity for years; its identifier needs to grow with it. The RAiD service architecture supports this via versioning: each update produces a new version of the RAiD record, with the old versions preserved as historical states.
The interlock with other PIDs
RAiD’s value is largely in the interlock layer. A RAiD record references the ORCID iDs of its participants; ORCID 4.0 carries the RAiDs of its researcher’s projects. A RAiD references the DOIs of its outputs; Crossref and DataCite metadata reference the RAiD via the relationship blocks. A RAiD references the Funder Registry IDs of its funders and the grant DOIs (where they exist) of its grants; the Crossref Grant Linking System grants reference the RAiD via the contributes-to relationship.
The result is a structured graph: from a RAiD, an integrator can traverse to participants (ORCID), institutions (ROR), funders (Funder Registry/ROR), grants (grant DOIs), and outputs (DOIs). The graph is queryable. The OpenAIRE Graph already operationalises this for European projects; the CASRAI persistent identifiers domain tracks the broader integration.
What’s working well
Three operational patterns deserve flagging.
First, funder-issued RAiDs. The pattern of the funder issuing the RAiD on award and the awardee inheriting it has worked well. The funder has the structured grant data; the awardee has the operational knowledge of the project. The funder issues the RAiD with the structured data they have; the awardee updates it as the project evolves. This minimises the burden on researchers and ensures RAiD coverage is complete for funded work.
Second, institutional-CRIS integration. CRIS systems that ingest RAiDs from their researchers’ projects and propagate them to outputs as a metadata field have closed the project-to-output linkage that previously required string-matching grant numbers. The integration is straightforward; the value compounds over time as the historical record accumulates.
Third, cross-funder collaboration. A project with multiple funders (typical in large clinical trials and EU consortia) can have a single RAiD referencing all the funders’ grants. This addresses a longstanding accounting friction where multi-funder projects appeared as multiple disconnected projects in funder reporting systems.
What’s not working yet
Three issues remain open.
First, retroactive RAiDs for historical projects. RAiD coverage is forward-looking from each jurisdiction’s start date. Historical projects (pre-2022 or so) do not have RAiDs; building the historical record is a substantial data-engineering effort that no jurisdiction has fully completed.
Second, international coordination. Different jurisdictions have different RAiD service providers, different operational arrangements, and slightly different metadata profiles. The RAiD Steering Group is working on harmonisation but the work is incomplete. A project that crosses jurisdictions may have RAiDs from multiple providers, with the integration between them not yet seamless.
Third, the unfunded-project case. RAiD was designed around funded projects, with the funder as the natural issuer. Unfunded research activity (self-funded, doctoral student projects without grants, community-research projects without traditional funders) does not have a clear RAiD-issuance path. The RAiD service architecture supports researcher-issued RAiDs; the institutional and funder workflows have not fully accommodated this case.
What integrators should do
For institutions running a CRIS, the priorities are: ingest RAiDs into the project record; propagate to outputs as metadata; reconcile with ORCID’s funding and contribution data; surface in research-administration reporting.
For publishers, the priority is to accept RAiDs in submission systems as a funding-reference option alongside Funder Registry entries and grant DOIs, and to deposit RAiDs to Crossref via the relationships block. Several publishers have done this; broader adoption through 2026 would be welcome.
For funders that have not yet issued RAiDs, the priority is to evaluate the operational integration. ARDC’s documentation and the UKRI implementation are useful reference points. The integration is non-trivial but not large; institutions that have done it report it pays back within 18 months in reduced cross-system reconciliation effort.
The broader pattern
RAiD adoption is the latest instance of the persistent-identifier pattern: a structured identifier for a class of research entities, with an operational service to mint and resolve them, with metadata that interlocks with other PIDs, with adoption that takes years to reach scale but compounds in value as it does. ORCID took a decade to reach saturation; ROR took five years to reach the equivalent in its space; RAiD is plausibly on a five-to-seven-year trajectory to comparable coverage.
For the CASRAI community, the practical posture in 2026 is to incorporate RAiD into integration designs from the outset, to track adoption by jurisdiction, and to advocate for adoption where the operational case is strong. The PID quartet of ORCID-ROR-RAiD-DOI is increasingly the foundation on which research-information integration is built; the more complete that foundation, the more useful the integration layer becomes.
