Reproducibility through Identifiers: Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for research facilities and instruments

Assigning Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) to facilities and instruments allows data users to better understand how and where data is created, facilitating reproducibility and broadening discoverability and attribution for the facilities and instruments themselves. In light of the fragmentation of the open-science ecosystem, a community-based coordinated approach is necessary to ensure PIDs for facilities and instruments are adopted in ways that provide the widest benefits to everyone involved in the research landscape. It is particularly important for the social and geospatial data communities to participate in this effort as social and geospatial researchers increasingly collaborate with colleagues in the natural sciences to generate and use complex datasets produced by capital-intensive facilities and instruments.

This presentation will introduce findings from the first year of activities conducted by the FAIR Facilities and Instruments project (funded by the American National Science Foundation’s FAIR Open Science Research Coordination Network) to bring together communities from a range of disciplines and roles and to identify use cases such as allowing facilities and instruments to be connected to other entities like data sets, researchers, organizations, articles, grants, and more. Activities included multiple online focus groups with various communities and an in-person workshop that convened experts from around the USA to discuss motivations for and barriers to PID adoption, as well as realistic near-term actions to pursue. Project findings to date represent an important step on the path to incorporating facility and instrument PIDs into the wider data ecosystem and developing community-based recommendations and best practices for research transparency and reproducibility in the next generation of interdisciplinary geospatial and social scientific research.