Unlocking RAiD: turnKeyRM is the first CRIS to make it native

A persistent identifier is a durable, unique reference that doesn’t change when someone moves institutions, an organisation rebrands, or a project is renamed. Each one is issued by an organisation that stores metadata about it, which is what makes the record checkable.

Without identifiers, names, affiliations, funding and publications are typed as free text, taken on trust, and re-keyed into funder, university and publisher systems. The ARDC’s Incentives to Invest in Identifiers report estimates this costs the Australian sector about $24 million and 38,000 person days a year. The Australian National PID Strategy, the ARC Open Access Policy and PID Action Plan, and the NHMRC and MRFF Open Science Policy are now moving PIDs from good practice towards a condition of funding.

For research integrity, the benefit is simple. Whether a record is wrong through error or intent, identifiers let funders, reviewers and readers check it against a source instead of taking it on trust. They also create an audit trail linking researchers, projects, funding and outputs, and cut manual reporting because connected records are reused rather than re-keyed. Capturing identifiers when projects, participants and partners are set up, rather than retrofitting them later, means the data is cleaner from day one.

The ARDC report recommends five priority PIDs, and turnKeyRM supports all of them.

RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) was developed in Australia by the ARDC and is now a globally recognised standard. A ROR identifies an organisation, an ORCID iD identifies a person and a DOI identifies an output or object. A RAiD identifies the project itself, and links its people, organisations, funding, datasets and outputs across the whole project lifecycle.

That makes RAiD the missing piece in the PID ecosystem. It gives a project a persistent, machine-readable identity from the moment it begins, rather than leaving it to be pieced together from outputs after the fact. Staff changes are logged against the project record as the team changes. Because turnKeyRM is built around the Project, RAiDs are minted and maintained from the project record itself, with no need to reconcile information kept in separate tools or spreadsheets.

“Funders are moving PIDs from good practice to a condition of funding, and research offices shouldn’t have to build that capability themselves. By working directly with ARDC to adopt RAiD as a standard in turnKeyRM, we’re the first RIMS vendor to put it in our clients’ hands.”

— Wojciech Nadachowski, Managing Director, Foveal

PIDs tell you who and where. The Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) tells you what and why. It is how research in this region is described and reported:

• Field of Research (FoR): the discipline, what the research is
• Socio-Economic Objective (SEO): the intended benefit, why it’s done
• Type of Activity (TOA): pure basic, strategic basic, applied research or experimental development

When every project uses the same codes, you can group, filter and compare your research in ways free text can’t support. Government and funding bodies already report this way, so the effort pays off twice. ANZSRC codes are also mapped to the OECD’s Fields of Research and Development (FORD) and the Nomenclature for the Analysis and Comparison of Scientific Budgets and Programmes (NABS).

Here is where it gets interesting for cooperative research initiatives. A CRC is, at its heart, a network of universities, industry partners, government agencies and end users, each bringing different expertise. Yet most CRCs struggle with simple strategic questions:

Together, PIDs and ANZSRC turn the portfolio data you already maintain into a living capability map: an up-to-date view of your network’s expertise that changes as your portfolio changes.

The bottom line: less time spent assembling data, more confidence in it, and a clear picture of what your network can deliver.

If you’d like to see how RAiD, PIDs and ANZSRC codes could strengthen research integrity and map the capability of your network, we’d love to show you. Contact the Foveal team to book a walkthrough.