Skip to Main Content

University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research & Publication in Medicine & Health

Persistent Identigiers (PIDs)

PIDs are persistent, externally maintained links that provide permanent availability to information about people, places, and things. These include researchers, research institutions, funders, data, registrations, publications, and more research outputs. Unlike a regular URL, PIDs are maintained by external archiving registries, keeping PIDs permanent and persistent. In other words, the links will always work and direct readers to the appropriate content.

PIDs also enable interoperability across scholarly communication systems that research communities rely on, which is key to facilitating and sharing data and metadata that is FAIR.

Source: Open Science Network:

 

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)

A DOI provides a persistent link to research outputs no matter where they are housed. Adding a DOI to your OSF project or registration also means that a record of your content gets added to the Datacite or Crossref corpus, and is more likely to be indexed by other websites. DOIs can be used in citations too! See Purdue's help doc DOIs vs URLs, which provides a great guide on how to use DOIs in a citation. 

Source: Open Science Network:

Create a PID for youself

Researchers can also create a PID for themselves that can be associated with their research output DOIs. There are several organizations that create person identifiers, most communities and the OSF system will integrate with Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID iD). Once you have your own ORCID iD, you can add it to your OSF profile and your public research outputs on OSF will be associated with it.

Source: Open Science Network: