Prof. Shawn Ross1, Natasha Simons2
1Australian Research Data Commons, Sydney, Australia, 2Australian Research Data Commons, Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Prof. Shawn A Ross, FRSN, FSA (Ph.D. University of Washington, 2001) is a Professor of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, where he was also Director of eResearch (2017-2022). Shawn’s research interests include the history and archaeology of the ancient Balkans and the research applications of information technology. In 2022, he started an external secondment with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) as Product Manager for the Research Activity Identifier (RAiD). In 2024, this secondment expanded to include the role of Manager, National Information Infrastructure Products. Prof. Ross previously worked at UNSW Sydney and William Paterson University (New Jersey). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6492-9025
Natasha Simons is Director, National Coordination, for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). She leads a large, talented team of Program Managers, Product Managers and Subject Matter Experts contributing to deliver ARDC's strategic Research Data Commons initiatives. Based at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Natasha has a high international profile particularly in the area of persistent identifiers. She was serves on the Australian ORCID Steering Committee, co-chair of PIDfest Prague and the Research Data Alliance National PID Strategies Interest Group. She plays a key role in the development of the Australian National PID Strategy and Roadmap.
Abstract:
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).