It’s been over two years since I wrote about “Why PID Strategies Are Having A Moment — And Why You Should Care“. I’m prompted to revisit the topic now because the MoreBrains team (of which I’m a member) has just completed a cost-benefit analysis of persistent identifier adoption in the Czech Republic for the National Library of Technology (NTK), as part of the CARDS (Czech Academic and Research Discovery Services) project. It was a great reminder that, while there have certainly been common themes to every PID strategy/cost-benefit analysis we’ve worked on, no two countries are quite the same when it comes to PIDs. As with much of life, I suspect that the 80/20 rule applies here!

In terms of similarities, some of the motivations for conducting the analysis were very much the same as in other countries. Reducing the administrative burden on researchers and administrators – something that PIDs can help to mitigate – was, as always, key. As the National Research and Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialization of the Czech Republic 2021 – 2027 (the RIS3 strategy) points out: “Outdated legislation and a high administrative burden across the entire R&D system are… a problem.” The Innovation Strategy of the Czech Republic 2019-2030 is more specific, stating that it is a priority to “avoid the obligation to re-provide information already submitted earlier.” The amount of time that researchers, in particular, waste on repetitive manual tasks has been widely reported (including in Research Professional News and University Affairs), and PIDs help to address this problem by enabling the automated reuse of metadata. So, like the other cost-benefit analyses we’ve conducted, the Czech one was commissioned in order to evaluate and quantify current usage of PIDs in the country and, importantly, to assess the potential benefit of further expanding their use. As with our analyses of other countries, this one focused on five ‘priority’ PIDs: Digital Objective Identifiers (DOIs) for research results; ORCIDs for researchers; DOIs for grants; Research Activity Identifiers (RAiDs) for research activities; and Research Organization Registry identifiers (RORs) for research organizations. Together, these represent the research entities that are most commonly tracked and measured. In the Czech Republic, we found that the time savings from increased adoption of these PIDs could be as high as 7,207 person days per year, representing net savings of around $573k annually. Cost savings, at the current level, from Czech institutions’ membership of the ORCID and/or DataCite consortia (both of which are supported by NTK) generates an additional $132k+ in cost savings annually.

Support for increasing open research is another common theme in countries that are looking to increase PID adoption and implementation. PIDs are widely seen as a fundamental building block for open research, in part because the metadata associated with them is invaluable for tracking and monitoring open access (OA) goals. The European Commission’s guidance on access to scientific research states explicitly that “Member States should ensure that … publications resulting from public funding are easily identifiable by appropriate technical means, including through metadata attached to electronic versions of the research output and persistent identifiers.” The priority PIDs mentioned above were selected in part because they, and the metadata associated with them, are openly available. Not only does this enable the information they contain to flow freely between systems that have implemented these PIDs, it also means that they are FAIR compliant. The FAIR Guiding Principles, established in 2016, are widely seen as fundamental to open research and have been globally adopted as a way to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. PIDs are a key element of the principles; indeed, the first principle (F1) is that “(Meta)data are assigned globally unique and persistent identifiers. Nations like the Czech Republic, therefore, which are seeking to support and grow open research, see PIDs as an essential component of their efforts.

So much for the commonalities; what were the differences between the Czech PID analysis and other countries?

First of all, contextually, this project was somewhat different from other national PID work we’ve conducted, in that there was a specific emphasis on the need to develop the Czech knowledge economy. While this was an implicit goal of PID strategies in other countries, here it was front and center, because it’s at the heart of the Czech RIS3 Strategy: “The long-term strategic vision formulates the basic direction of the development of the Czech Republic with an emphasis on the sphere of the knowledge economy and the transformation of the economy so that competitiveness based on innovation grows.” RIS3 recognizes that strategic insights and evidence are essential in order to build a strong knowledge economy for the long term, and PIDs are an invaluable tool for monitoring many of the indicators of quality underpinning their goals. For example, RORs can be used to track organizational affiliations for international partners; ORCIDs can help identify collaborators and track their publications; and so on.

Another new (for us) experience in terms of this sort of analysis was working with a national CRIS system. The Czech Research, Development, and Innovation Information System (IS VaVaI) is a public information system that collects, processes, uses, and provides information on research, development, and innovation supported by Czech public funding. Much of the data that we needed for our analysis is stored in this system – but it’s entirely in Czech, so we were reliant on our NTK friends for a lot of help in understanding how it works!

This project also differs from the others in that it includes a specific requirement to revisit the cost-benefit analysis before the completion of the CARDS project in 2028. This is intended to determine what progress has been made towards increasing the adoption of PIDs, to evaluate the benefits delivered as a result, and to formulate further plans and strategies for continuing to support PIDs. While we’ve developed roadmaps for other PID projects that include a recommendation to review progress towards the goals that have been set, this is the first time that formally revisiting our analysis has been an integral part of the process. Needless to say, it made us think extra carefully about what should be measured and how – both now and in three years time.

If you’re interested in learning more about national PID strategies – including what they have in common and where they differ – then I highly recommend checking out (and/or joining) the Research Data Alliance’s PID National PID Strategies Interest Group.