Guide · August 2023
Published in August 2023 as part of the Implementing FAIR Workflows project, this Guide is a joint publication by three open scholarly infrastructure organisations—Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID. It introduces the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and open metadata in facilitating open and FAIR research, and walks funders through concrete ways to engage: committing resources, enacting congruent policies, and providing support around grant application, management, and reporting.
Understand why funder participation in the PID and metadata infrastructure matters. Persistent identifiers and open metadata are what connect grants to the research outputs, people, and organisations they support—enabling assessment, discovery, and long-term stewardship of the record.
See what policy and resourcing decisions align a funder with the wider ecosystem. The Guide sets out recommendations funders can adopt—from PID and metadata requirements in grant conditions, to committing to the community-owned infrastructure that maintains those records.
Apply the recommendations across grant application, management, and reporting. Concrete workflow guidance for embedding Crossref grant IDs, DataCite dataset/software IDs, and ORCID researcher IDs across the funder’s own systems and reporting pipelines.
Implementing FAIR Workflows is a three-year project delivering exemplar FAIR workflows in cognitive neuroscience research, built on the existing PID and metadata infrastructure. This Guide is one of the project’s community-facing outputs, developed by the DataCite project team in collaboration with Crossref and ORCID.
