After all the festivities at the end of the year where family and friends connect, OpenAIRE together with FREYA will start off the new year with a webinar on digital connections: the Persistent Identifiers. The Science Europe Data Glossary defines the term Persistent Identifier (PID) as “a long-lasting reference to a digital object — a single file or set of files”. As such, the importance of PIDs to build stable connections between research entities such as grants, projects, articles, or funders is recognized and addressed by several initiatives and projects.   

FREYA is a 3-year project funded by the European Commission, aiming to extend the infrastructure for persistent identifiers (PIDs) as a core component of open research, in the EU and globally. FREYA will improve discovery, navigation, retrieval, and access to research resources. In so doing, FREYA has carried out a survey of the current PID landscape, collected a vast amount of user stories in order to identify needs of the community to expand existing and establish new PID services, and is currently working on building a PID Graph.  

In the webinar, Ketil Koop-Jakobsen will talk about a report on requirements for new PID Services. To identify demands and requirements for emerging PIDs, FREYA collected user stories from their respective communities and networks. More than 70 user stories were compiled, each identifying a specific PID demand from the community. Koop-Jakobsen will introduce some of these stories and explain their influence on the development of new and emerging PID types. Amir Aryani, moreover, will shed light on FREYA’s work on the PID Graph, talking about the discussion around the concept of the PID Graph itself and how FREYA partners are contributing to the actual setup of such a Graph.   

And Iryna Kuchma will talk how OpenAIRE is using PIDs for discovery, enrichment, and linking of research results.