The unique identification of publication services - such as repositories or journals - and research information systems (RIS) is central to the reliable referencing, indexing and reuse of scientific content. Persistent identifiers (PIDs) help to increase the visibility and interoperability of these infrastructures. Publication services and RIS are referenced in various directories - such as OpenDOAR, re3data, FAIRsharing, DOAJ or DRIS. Aggregators and citation databases such as BASE, OpenAIRE or DataCite also access this information, e.g. for indexing content or assigning PIDs.

Challenges due to a lack of standardization

In practice, there are often several identifiers for the same services, sometimes with different names. This lack of uniformity can lead to double registrations, inconsistencies and increased coordination effort - especially when it comes to further processing by aggregators and providers of value-added services.

Which PIDs are used - and where are they available?

• DOIs for repositories and other services
  To date, only a few initiatives such as re3data or FAIRSharing have issued DOIs for the permanent identification of repositories. These PIDs enable stable referencing of services in other systems.
• Other reference portals
  In addition to re3data and FAIRSharing, there are other subject and infrastructure directories (e.g. OpenDOAR, DOAJ, DRIS) that list publication services - but so far without consolidated PID allocation. Coordinated use of standardized identifiers for scientific information services is an important step towards ensuring interoperability, data quality and referenceability in the long term.

These challenges were discussed at our workshop in Bielefeld in March 2024.