Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/PID/What is a PID

What is a PID and what is the value of PIDs?

PIDs are sometimes described as a social security number for a research object (source). They ensure unambiguous identification and secure location of research outputs even if their associated URL changes over time. PIDs and the metadata associated with them are both visible to machines and humans and help them equally to describe the type of resource, where to find it, and how to reuse it. But it is not only research outputs such as publications or data sets that can have PIDs assigned but also content creators (scholars), organisations or even funding bodies. With the help of them, we can persistently link and connect articles with the underlying data, software and funding information across the research lifecycle to support the reproducibility of their research and maintain the provenance footprints for each output over all their versions.