The Persistent Identifier Heist: An Escape Room activity

This interactive escape room, The Persistent Identifier Heist, invites participants to dive into the world of persistent identifiers—ORCID, DOI, and ROR—through a 90-minute team challenge. Groups of 4–6 will solve puzzles based on real-world metadata tasks: matching researchers to their ORCID iDs, reconstructing DOIs to reveal hidden research, and tracing institutional affiliations via ROR IDs. Designed to foster collaboration and practical PID literacy, the activity blends problem-solving with engaging storytelling. Participants will use freely available tools and platforms to verify their answers, gaining hands-on experience with the infrastructure that underpins research integrity and discoverability. Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Christian Gumpenberger and Andreas Ferus, who initially proposed the idea of a PID-topic escape room