NISO Assumes New Role as Host of PID Forum

Beginning in January 2021, the NISO organization will be hosting the PID Forum (www.pidforum.org), an online platform for the persistent identifier (PID) community, launched in 2019 under the auspices of the FREYA Project. FREYA was funded under the European Horizon 2020 program (grant number 777523) and has been developing the infrastructure for PIDs in the European Open Science Cloud and globally. Following a competitive tender process earlier this year, NISO was chosen by FREYA to host the Forum after the three-year project ends.

The PID Forum is one of three key FREYA outputs, along with the PID Graph and the PID Commons. It is intended to be an open and inclusive online platform to bring together the various communities working with PIDs in the research world. Popular features include a Knowledge Hub, User Stories, PID News & Blogs, and PID-related Events. It is also used as an online meeting place by groups within the PID community, including the Research Organizations Registry (ROR) and the FREYA Ambassadors.

NISO is closely involved in the PIDs community through its work to formalize persistent identifiers such as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), serials numbers, and related metadata structures as standards; its role as Secretariat of the ISO group responsible for standardizing and maintaining a number of international PIDs (TC46/SC9); its incorporation and promotion of PIDs into other standards, schema, and recommended practices; and, from 2021, its involvement as a co-organizer of the annual PIDapalooza festival of persistent identifiers.

While no immediate changes are planned for the PID Forum from a technical standpoint, NISO will be surveying the community in early 2021 to help establish priorities for expanding community engagement and support for the Forum, building on the success of the FREYA team’s work. 

“Building a community is one of the most challenging aspects of supporting technical infrastructure. The FREYA Project team has done an amazing job gathering and engaging PID enthusiasts to participate in the PID Forum,” said Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “We look forward to nurturing and further expanding the Forum that FREYA has created.  We encourage the worldwide community of providers and users of persistent identifiers to reach out and share your thoughts about how the Forum should continue to evolve.” 

Simon Lambert, the coordinator of the FREYA project, said: “The PID Forum is one of the three pillars of FREYA, along with the PID Graph and the PID Commons, and has been one of the project’s most notable achievements in terms of engaging with a wide community and covering a great range of PID-related issues. I am very pleased that the future of the Forum is now secure in the hands of NISO and I am confident it will continue to be an important component of the PID landscape.”