Three Identifiers, One CRIS Making PIDs Do the Heavy Lifting in DSpace

Most repositories already store ORCID iDs, ROR IDs and DOIs. In many of them, however, these identifiers do little more than tick compliance boxes: they are stored, displayed and never used. This talk argues that the same three identifiers, treated as infrastructure rather than metadata fields, are the mechanism that turns a publication repository into a Current Research Information System (CRIS), without a platform migration or a new procurement. Drawing on production DSpace and DSpace-CRIS implementations, the talk presents five ways to make PIDs work harder. DOI lookup pre-fills records with metadata from Crossref, OpenAlex and DataCite. ORCID iDs become the foundation of researcher profiles, with import and two-way synchronisation. ROR IDs resolve years of affiliation variants into organisational unit entities. Identifier-based harvesting brings publications from Web of Science, Scopus, OpenAlex and Crossref into a curated review queue on a schedule. Finally, outbound flows carry the same identifiers to ORCID, DataCite, OpenAIRE and other aggregators. The talk also gives an honest account of where adoption breaks down. The main barrier is rarely technical. It is the lack of an institutional PID policy and limited awareness that well-maintained PIDs improve the global scholarly record, not only local data. To address this, the talk proposes a minimal viable PID policy and a five-step roadmap for getting started. The talk ends with a first-hand, longitudinal view of Poland’s national ORCID mandate (2018-2021). The mandate was introduced by the 2018 Law on Higher Education and Science and implemented in the Polish Scholarly Bibliography (PBN). Six years on, the data and awareness it created remain, but the pace slowed once the requirement was lifted. The talk draws lessons from this for institutions, policymakers and infrastructure providers.