Persistent Identifiers & Research Information Systems

What this cluster covers

Research administration runs on identifiers: stable, unambiguous ways to refer to a
researcher, an organisation, a research output, or a project across systems that were never
designed to talk to each other. This cluster is CASRAI’s home for that infrastructure — the
persistent identifiers themselves (ORCID, DOI, ROR, RAiD) and the research information
systems (CRIS/RIM platforms) that consume and exchange them, usually via the CERIF data
model.

The Dictionary already has real depth here — the
persistent identifier ecosystem domain
(44 terms) and the
research information systems and
integration domain (34 terms) between them define most of the vocabulary this page
introduces. This pillar is the practical entry point into that vocabulary, not a
replacement for it — follow the links below to the operational definitions.

The core persistent identifiers

ORCID iD — for people

An ORCID iD is a free, 16-digit persistent
identifier for an individual researcher, issued and maintained by the nonprofit organisation
ORCID. It’s expressed as a URI (https://orcid.org/xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx) and its
identifier format is compatible with ISO 27729 (the International Standard Name Identifier,
ISNI) — ORCID draws its numbers from a block reserved by the ISNI International Agency, so
the same number is never assigned to two different registries’ identifiers. CASRAI’s own
explainer covers registration and lookup in more detail: see
What is an ORCID iD? A researcher’s ORCID record can
also assert or accept claimed works, employment, and education history — see
ORCID work assertion,
ORCID employment, and
ORCID record permissions for how that
actually works.

See also RENACYT — RENACYT is CONCYTEC’s registry that classifies Peruvian researchers through the CTI Vitae platform.

DOI — for research outputs

A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a persistent
identifier for a digital or physical object — most commonly a journal article, dataset, or
preprint. The DOI system is standardised as ISO 26324:2012 (“Information and documentation —
Digital object identifier system”), developed by ISO/TC 46, with the International DOI
Foundation as the registration authority. In practice, a DOI is assigned by a registration
agency — Crossref for most published scholarly literature
(Crossref DOI) or DataCite for datasets and other
research outputs (DataCite DOI) — and structurally
consists of a prefix identifying the registrant and
a suffix identifying the specific object. A DOI that
resolves to a retraction or removal notice rather than the original content is often described
by a DOI tombstone record.

ROR — for organisations

A ROR ID is an identifier from the Research
Organization Registry, a community-led, open registry that solves a specific interoperability
problem: reliably identifying which institution a researcher, funder, or output is affiliated
with, across systems that otherwise each use their own institution name spellings and
abbreviations. ROR launched in January 2019, built by California Digital Library, Crossref,
and DataCite following earlier collaborative work (the “Org-ID-Initiative,” including ORCID)
on the same problem, seeded initially with data from Digital Science’s GRID project. Each
curated organisation record carries
variant names, location, and mappings to other identifier systems for the same institution.

RAiD — for projects and activities

A RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) identifies a
research project or activity itself — as distinct from a person, an organisation, or a single
output — and is designed to persist across the full lifecycle of that project, including
across institutional and funder boundaries when a project involves several. RAiD is
standardised as ISO 23527:2022. A project’s outputs, contributors, and outcomes can all be
linked back to a single RAiD-anchored record — see
Project ID (RAiD-anchored).

CRIS and research information systems

A CRIS (current research information system) — also
called a research information management (RIM) system — is institutional infrastructure that
tracks research activity: people, projects, outputs, funding, and the relationships between
them, usually to support internal reporting, funder compliance, and public research
portfolios. Well-known CRIS/RIM platforms include Pure, Symplectic Elements, VIVO, and
DSpace-CRIS (see DSpace-CRIS).

What makes a CRIS useful beyond a single institution is interoperability, and the model most
CRIS platforms in Europe converge on for that is
CERIF (Common European Research Information Format),
maintained by euroCRIS. CERIF, together with OAI-PMH harvesting and the OpenAIRE Guidelines,
is the mechanism that connects a repository deposit to institutional CRIS reporting without
re-keying the same metadata by hand. CASRAI’s Dictionary models the entities a CRIS actually
tracks — see person record,
project,
research output,
research activity,
research entity, and
affiliation — and the practical question of
getting two systems’ records to agree, in
CRIS interoperability.

How the identifiers connect: the crosswalk problem

None of ORCID, DOI, ROR, and RAiD work in isolation — the value of each compounds when a
research information system can reliably link them together: an output’s DOI to its authors’
ORCID iDs, those authors’ ORCID iDs to their institutions’ ROR IDs, and the whole set to the
RAiD of the project that produced it. Getting that linkage right, consistently, across systems
that each modelled the relationship slightly differently, is what CASRAI’s Dictionary calls an
identifier crosswalk — a mapping between
one metadata schema’s representation of an entity and another’s (for example, how a CRediT
contributor role maps to DataCite’s contributorType vocabulary). This
crosswalk work is a large part of what standing infrastructure like CASRAI’s Dictionary and
picklists exists to make explicit and machine-readable, rather than left to each institution to
reinvent independently.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between ORCID, DOI, ROR, and RAiD?

They identify different kinds of thing. ORCID identifies a person, DOI identifies an
output (article, dataset, preprint), ROR identifies an organisation, and RAiD identifies a
project or activity. A single piece of research typically touches all four: a researcher
(ORCID) at an institution (ROR) working on a project (RAiD) that produces an output (DOI).

Is a DOI the same as an ISBN?

No. An ISBN identifies a published book edition within its own registration system; a DOI
is a general-purpose persistent identifier standardised under ISO 26324:2012 that can identify
a much wider range of digital and physical objects, and unlike an ISBN it comes with a built-in
resolution mechanism (doi.org) that redirects to the object’s current location even if that
location changes.

What is a CRIS, in plain terms?

A CRIS (current research information system) is the software an institution uses to track
who is doing what research, funded by whom, producing which outputs — the internal system of
record that then reports out to funders, publishes a public research portfolio, and (ideally)
exchanges data with external systems like ORCID, Crossref, and DataCite instead of requiring
manual re-entry.

Who maintains these identifiers and standards?

Each is stewarded by a different nonprofit or standards body: ORCID by the ORCID
organisation; DOI syntax by ISO/TC 46 with the International DOI Foundation as registration
authority, and DOI registration in practice by agencies like Crossref and DataCite; ROR by a
community governance structure originally convened by California Digital Library, Crossref,
and DataCite; RAiD under ISO 23527:2022; and CERIF, the data model most CRIS platforms use for
interoperability, by euroCRIS.

Do I need all of these if my institution already has a CRIS?

Usually yes, in the sense that a CRIS is a consumer of these identifiers, not a replacement
for them. A CRIS is far more useful when the records inside it are anchored to ORCID, ROR,
DOI, and (increasingly) RAiD identifiers rather than free-text names, because that’s what
lets it exchange data reliably with external systems instead of relying on manual matching.

Explore this cluster

This pillar page lists every guide and comparison published under the cris-identifiers
cluster as they go live — check back as coverage grows. In the meantime, the Dictionary
domains linked above are the most complete existing CASRAI resource for this topic area, and
the ORCID iD explainer covers registration and lookup
for researchers specifically.

Related reading: Research Activity Identifier — RAiD has moved from pilot to operational service in several jurisdictions.

Related reading: Pure CRIS — A practical implementation checklist for research offices deploying Elsevier Pure: data mapping from legacy systems, ORCID/Scopus/HR integration points, stakeholder and change-management considerations, and typical rollout sequencing.

Further reading: TechRxiv — TechRxiv is IEEE’s free, moderated preprint server for engineering, computer science, and related technology — launched 2020, Figshare-hosted, DOI-bearing, and distinct from IEEE’s own peer-reviewed journals.