Using Research Activity Identifiers (RAiD) to track and report on project: a guide for researchers and research organisations

The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) is a persistent identifier for research projects and related activities, which links a project s organisations, people, inputs and outputs and provides key information not found elsewhere. RAiD is a key component of the Australian National PID Strategy because it reduces the administrative burden of research project management, facilitate reporting of research outputs and impacts, and makes research more transparent by exposing a project s make-up and how it changes over time. RAiD is an ISO standard and with ARDC as the international Registration Authority, RAiD is now part of the European Open Science Cloud and other significant international eResearch infrastructures. This talk provides an overview of RAiD, exploring applications of RAiD for researchers, research support staff, and research organisations. We will introduce RAiD s metadata schema, user interface, and API, illustrate how the system works using an example RAiD, and explore how research organisations and their staff can benefit from RAiD. More specifically, we will discuss use cases including: (1) how connecting RAiD to various systems at multiple organisation can provide a source of truth for project information, saving save time and improving the quality and consistency of information around the project administration; (2) how RAiD can be used to generate reports about project outputs, and contribute to a better understand relationships between resourcing and research outcomes; and (3) how RAiD can improve the transparency of research and the production of FAIR data by exposing project metadata (including historical metadata).