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Persistent Identifiers (PIDs)

The Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (DOE OSTI) offers persistent identifier (PID) services to the DOE community and the US Government. A PID is a digital identifier that is globally unique, persistent, machine resolvable, has an associated metadata schema, identifies an entity, and is frequently used to disambiguate between entities.

The White House has provided guidance and expectations to agencies about the use of PIDs. DOE has developed policies and guidance to address those expectations.

PIDs forData

OSTI provides DOIs for DOE-funded research data through the free DOE Data ID Service and to partnering US government agencies through the Interagency DOI Service.

PIDs forSoftware

OSTI provides DOIs for DOE-funded software through the DOE software services platform and search tool DOE CODE. DOIs are optionally assigned when submitting software to OSTI and automatically assigned through the formal software announcement process.

PIDs forText Documents

OSTI automatically assigns DOIs to DOE-funded technical reports, workshop reports, conference posters, and presentations submitted to OSTI through the E-Link submission system.

PIDs forAwards

OSTI provides the Award DOI Service for DOE organizations to assign DOIs to awards, grants, and contracts.

PIDs forPeople

OSTI leads the US Government ORCID Consortium for US government organizations who would like to use, collect, and integrate ORCID iDs into their research workflows.

PIDs forOrganizations

OSTI maintains an internal organization authority that maps organization names to organization PIDs such as ROR, DOI, Wikidata, and Ringgold identifiers.

Connecting Persistent Identifiers

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) provide ways to connect research components and make those connections easier to identify. PIDs can be associated with research outputs such as articles, data, and software, as well as people, organizations, and funding. PIDs promote FAIR practices by supporting linkages, providing increased discoverability, and enabling interoperability between research components.

Explore the way to connect PIDs »

Connecting

Impact of Using Persistent Identifiers

Impact

As more organizations begin connecting research components using persistent identifiers (PIDs), individual researchers, research-conducting organizations, and funding organizations can better understand the impact of their work. One example to explore impact and the influence of a journal articles is by looking at article citations over time.

Explore measuring impact through PID adoption »