CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: POSI

  • The PID graph: connecting ORCID, ROR, DOI and RAiD into a research knowledge graph

    A persistent identifier is useful on its own: an ORCID iD reliably points to a researcher, a DOI to an output, a ROR identifier to an organisation, a RAiD to a research project or activity. But the real power of persistent identifiers is not in any single one of them — it is in the connections between them. When the identifier for a person is linked to the identifiers for their outputs, and those to the identifier for the project that produced them, and that to the identifier for the funding organisation behind it, something new emerges: a navigable web of relationships, a PID graph, that lets the research landscape be traversed as a connected whole rather than queried as a heap of separate records. This article explains the PID graph and why it depends on open metadata, drawing on the persistent-identifiers domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    From individual identifiers to a graph

    Each persistent identifier solves a problem of ambiguity. ORCID disambiguates researchers, following them across name changes and institutions. ROR disambiguates organisations, giving each a single identifier despite its many name variants. DOIs give outputs — articles, datasets, software — stable, citable identity. RAiD identifies the project or activity itself, the container within which work happens over time. Individually each is valuable, but each identifier also carries metadata describing its relationships: an output’s metadata can record its authors’ ORCID iDs, their organisations’ ROR identifiers and the project’s RAiD. When these relationship statements are gathered across the whole system, the separate identifiers knit together into a graph — nodes for people, organisations, outputs and projects, joined by edges that say authored, affiliated with, part of, funded by. The graph is the system of identifiers seen as a connected structure rather than a set of isolated points.

    What the FREYA project established

    The concept of the PID graph was developed and matured substantially through the European FREYA project, in which DataCite and partners advanced the infrastructure and thinking behind connecting persistent identifiers. FREYA articulated the PID graph as an explicit idea: that the relationships recorded in PID metadata constitute a graph that can be built, queried and traversed, unlocking capabilities no single registry can offer alone. Its lasting contribution was to show that persistent identifiers are not merely labels but the nodes of a knowledge graph waiting to be connected, and that the metadata linking them is the substance from which the graph is made.

    What a PID graph makes possible

    A connected graph of identifiers enables things that disconnected registries cannot:

    • Following the threads of a career or project. From a researcher’s ORCID iD one can reach their outputs, their affiliations and the projects they worked on, assembling a complete picture automatically rather than by hand.
    • Answering “what came from this funding?” By following links from a funder or project to its outputs, the graph answers the question funders most want answered, without each grant holder reporting everything manually.
    • Reducing reporting burden. Because relationships are recorded once in open metadata, systems can reuse them instead of asking researchers to re-enter the same information.
    • Building new services. Discovery tools, analytics and national research-information systems can be built on top of the graph rather than reconstructing the same connections independently.

    Why open metadata is the foundation

    The single most important condition for a useful PID graph is that the connecting metadata be open. The graph is built from the relationship statements carried in identifier metadata, and those statements are only useful for building a shared, navigable graph if they are openly available for anyone to harvest, link and reuse. This is why the open-metadata commitments of organisations such as Crossref and DataCite — the principal DOI registration agencies for scholarly outputs and research data respectively — matter so much. When the metadata describing outputs, their authors, affiliations and funding is open, the relationships within it can be assembled into a graph by anyone. When metadata is closed or paywalled, the connections are locked away, and the graph that could have been built from them cannot be. Open metadata is not a nicety here; it is the raw material of the graph, and the degree of openness directly determines how complete the graph can be.

    Open infrastructure and POSI

    A research knowledge graph that the whole community depends on must rest on infrastructure the community can trust to remain open and stable. This is the concern of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), which set out commitments around governance, sustainability and insurance that help ensure shared infrastructure serves the community over the long term rather than being captured or quietly enclosed. Several of the key identifier organisations have engaged with POSI precisely because the value of the PID graph depends on its constituent registries remaining open, governed in the community interest and durable. A graph built on infrastructure that might close, paywall its metadata or disappear is a fragile foundation; POSI articulates what it takes for that foundation to be trustworthy. The openness of the metadata and of the infrastructure that holds it are two aspects of the same requirement.

    A consistent vocabulary for the graph

    For identifiers and their relationships to connect across the many systems that hold them, the relationship types and the entities they join must mean the same thing everywhere — what it means to be an author, an affiliation or a part of a project. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary works towards: a shared vocabulary so that the metadata forming the graph’s edges is understood identically wherever it originated. The contributions recorded in that metadata can be described with the CRediT taxonomy, adding who did what to the connections between people and the outputs they produced; to see how the major identifiers relate, our comparison material sets them side by side. Persistent identifiers solve ambiguity one entity at a time; the PID graph turns those solved ambiguities into a connected map of research, and open metadata is what keeps that map whole.

  • Open scholarly infrastructure and the POSI principles

    Modern scholarship runs on infrastructure that most researchers never think about. When you cite a paper by its DOI, look up a colleague by their ORCID iD, find a repository in a registry, or rely on a dataset resolving years after it was deposited, you are depending on registries, identifier systems and metadata services that quietly hold the whole enterprise together. Like any infrastructure — roads, water, power — it is invisible when it works and catastrophic when it fails. And infrastructure carries particular risks: it can be captured by a single commercial owner, locked behind paywalls, allowed to decay through underfunding, or simply shut down. The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) were written to address exactly these risks. This article explains them and where they sit in relation to the data infrastructure domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Why infrastructure is a special case

    The reason infrastructure needs its own principles is that the ordinary market does not protect it well. A piece of scholarly infrastructure — an identifier registry, say — becomes valuable precisely because everyone adopts it, which makes it hard to replace and gives whoever controls it considerable power. If that controller raises prices, restricts access, or is acquired and redirected, the whole community that depends on it is exposed, having built years of practice and data around something it does not govern. The danger is not hypothetical: the history of scholarly communication includes services that were widely relied upon and then acquired, closed or paywalled. POSI exists to make the organisations running open infrastructure resilient against these failure modes by design, not by goodwill.

    The three pillars of POSI

    The POSI principles are organised around three concerns: governance, sustainability, and insurance.

    • Governance asks who controls the infrastructure and on whose behalf. POSI calls for the community served to be represented in governance, for the organisation to be a non-discriminatory stakeholder so that no single interest dominates, and for transparency in how decisions are made. The aim is that the people who depend on a service have a genuine say in its direction.
    • Sustainability asks whether the organisation can last. POSI favours business models that do not depend on a single revenue source or funder, that build sufficient reserves to survive disruption, and that generate surplus to invest in their own future — rather than living grant to grant or relying on one large patron whose withdrawal would be fatal.
    • Insurance asks what happens if the organisation fails anyway. This is POSI’s most distinctive idea: that open data and open source are a form of insurance. If the underlying data are available under an open licence and the software is open source, then even if the original organisation collapses, the community can pick up the work and continue it. Open licensing turns a single point of failure into something recoverable.

    Why the ‘insurance’ idea matters most

    The insurance pillar is what makes POSI more than a wish-list. Governance and sustainability reduce the chance of failure; insurance limits the damage when it happens regardless. By insisting that the data be openly licensed and the code open source, POSI ensures that no organisation running open infrastructure can hold the community hostage — because the community always retains the ability to fork the software and continue with the data. This is what genuinely distinguishes open infrastructure from a well-intentioned but proprietary service: the credible ability to walk away and rebuild. It converts trust-by-promise into trust-by-construction.

    POSI in practice

    POSI is not merely aspirational; a number of the organisations that operate the identifier and metadata services scholarship relies on have publicly adopted the principles and report against them, examining their own governance, funding and openness and disclosing where they fall short. That practice of self-assessment and public reporting is itself part of the value: it gives the community a way to judge whether a piece of infrastructure it depends on is actually being run in a durable, accountable way, rather than taking assurances on faith. For institutions choosing which services to build on, POSI alignment is a meaningful signal of long-term reliability.

    Infrastructure, federation and the wider network

    Open infrastructure is rarely a single monolith; it is a network of interoperating services that must work together — identifiers resolving against registries, metadata flowing between systems, repositories exchanging records. That federated character is precisely why open standards and open governance matter so much: interoperability across many organisations is only sustainable when no single one controls the connecting standards. Our work on federation describes how distributed services interoperate while remaining independently governed, which is the practical expression of the POSI mindset applied to a network rather than a single service.

    A shared foundation worth protecting

    The deeper message of POSI is that the systems holding scholarship together are a shared foundation, and that foundations require deliberate care to remain open, durable and accountable. Governance that represents the community, sustainability that does not depend on a single point of support, and the insurance of open data and open code together make infrastructure something a community can rely on for the long term. Recognising and crediting the often-invisible work of building and maintaining this infrastructure — through structured contribution such as the CRediT taxonomy — is part of valuing it properly. The consistent vocabulary that lets these services describe and exchange information reliably is maintained in the CASRAI Dictionary, itself a small piece of the open infrastructure it documents.