Research projects and research activities

Last updated: 2026-08-26

Deciding on what makes up a research project may seem like a trivial issue, but this has proven to pose a considerable challenge in the contemporary digital research landscape. Difficulties arise when attempting to interlink research outputs, contributions and events as clusters of research activities. Historically, the creation of such connections has been relying on citations in reference lists, mentioning grants and acknowledging support from various actors, or creating free-form descriptions of projects within publications or on websites. However, descriptions of research and interlinking of related materials are now increasingly done using CRIS/RIMS systems and modern publication tools. These have a greater potential of meeting the needs of sharing unambiguous open research information, presenting it for human readers while also distributing it in the form of machine-actionable metadata.

Project, or activity?

Because of the various activity types encountered in research globally, it may be misleading to only consider research projects when working with identification and delimitation of research contexts. In many cases, the project concept is also strongly tied to specific funding and grants, sometimes even in a manner that excludes or disqualifies activities without external funding.

For this reason, several initiatives have started using the research activity concept as a broader and more inclusive term.

Examples of research activities

Unambiguous identification and clustering is relevant for a wide range of such research activities, including but not limited to:

• Externally funded research projects
• Internally funded or unfunded research projects
• Research programmes with several related projects over time
• Independent subprojects, work packages and defined project phases
• Field campaigns, expeditions and cruises
• Related activities recurring over long periods of time, such as recurring field seasons for a specific archaeological site
• Long-running studies divided into separately managed activities or waves
• Distributed citizen science projects coordinated by researchers
• Spontaneous collaborations between researchers resulting in data collection, analysis and publication of results
• Overarching thematic tracks encapsulating the activities of research groups or the research focus of individual or collaborating researchers
• Research evaluation activities relating to specific projects, infrastructures, teams or research groups

Needs for identifying and describing research activities

Identifying and describing projects and activities serves several core needs in the research ecosystem, such as:

• Defining clusters of interrelated open research information and research outputs
• Distinguishing projects with identical, similar or changing titles
• Linking researchers and contributors, organisations, grants, infrastructures, instruments and outputs to the activity
• Identifying materials used as inputs in the research activity, such as pre-existing data
• Preserving provenance and a history of changes throughout the activity lifecycle
• Expressing relationships between programmes, projects, subprojects and related activities
• Supporting discovery, administration, reporting, assessment and impact analysis
• Allowing project information to be exchanged between local and national CRIS systems, funder systems, repositories, aggregators, scientometric resources and other open research information infrastructures

A core need is also that this information should be available as machine-readable metadata.

Enabling research activity clustering through PIDs

The various outputs, individuals, organisations etc. related to a research activity may often be expressed with PIDs themselves. This means that identifying a research activity will also, in most cases, create a need to reference such PIDs to give a better picture of what the activity encompasses and produces. Moreover, creating explicit relations between a research activity and relevant PIDs will enable unambiguous machine readability of the context.

Systematic clustering of research activities using PIDs is quickly becoming a core mechanism of research metrics and monitoring. The concept of traversing interlinked PID metadata to gain understanding of how research and research outputs are related has been conceptually described in the concepts of Scientific Knowledge Graphs or PID Graphs.

International PIDs and identifiers

RAiD

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RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) is a PID for identifying research activities, such as research projects, programmes or collaborations. It is intended to identify a time-bounded research endeavour independently of any particular grant, output, institution or information system.

RAiD contains kernel metadata based on the RAiD Metadata Schema, identifying core information about the research activity, such as the researchers involved, the organisations responsible for the research, and the publications and other outputs created within the activity. This relies heavily on referring to other PIDs within the kernel metadata, such as ORCID, DOI or ROR ID. RAiD has been codified by the ISO standard ISO 23527:2022.

A real world example of a research project RAiD is 10.26259/ff442000. Using the global resolver, the full RAiD may be accessed at: https://raid.org/10.26259/ff442000

From the kernel metadata of this RAiD, we can see that this is a research project with the title Breathlessness Rapid Evaluation And THErapy (BREATHE) conducted at the research organisation with the ROR ID https://ror.org/02stey378, which is The University of Notre Dame Australia. Furthermore, an individual has been designated as a Principal or Chief Investigator (PI), with the ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4582-7728.

From the relational metadata, it is clear that this project is derived from an earlier research activity performing process evaluation, in turn having its own RAiD (10.26259/5ed6f934). When the project starts publishing outputs, they may also be referenced from the kernel metadata using relations, f.e. to each new article or dataset DOI.

In this manner, RAiD acts as a core PID for providing interoperable and open research information. As soon a research organisation ensures workflow compatibility with the metadata schema, RAiDs may be integrated in the standard functions of local CRIS/RIMS systems. It may be then used as a basis for institutional as well as national research tracking and evaluation workflows.

RAiD records are intended for project information that can ultimately be made public. Temporary embargos are supported, but confidential or security-sensitive project information should not be placed in the public registry.

RAiD makes use of the DataCite DOI infrastructure, meaning that a RAiD is also a valid DOI and that a core subset of its kernel metadata is registered with DataCite. However, the full RAiD metadata record is maintained by the RAiD service itself. RAiD should therefore be understood as a specialised PID system built on and extending DOI infrastructure, and should not be confused with a regular DOI assigned to a project landing page.

RAiDs are created and managed through RAiD Service Points that may be set up to serve specific communities, such as a discipline-specific research infrastructures, research institutes or universities. These Service Points are administered by regional RAiD Registration Agencies. At the moment, Registration Agencies are being created in the EU, UK, US and Canada, while the Oceanian region is already up and running.

RAiD was created by the Australian Research Data Commons, a NPO formed through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). ARDC is currently developing the RAiD standard as well as acting as the global RAiD Registration Authority, registering and onboarding new RAiD Registration Agencies.

In Finland, the national CRIS system Research.fi has started employing RAiD for identification of research projects¹. It is also identified as a core infrastructural component for building the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)².

DataCite DOI

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A generic DataCite DOI may be registered directly for a project. The DataCite Metadata Schema includes Project as a value for resourceTypeGeneral, defined for a planned endeavour or activity intended to achieve a particular aim using allocated resources. DataCite explicitly distinguishes the project itself from a project report, protocol, study registration or other output, which should be assigned the resource type appropriate to that object³.

A project DOI can connect the project to contributors, organisations, funding and outputs through DataCite relationship metadata and the DataCite PID Graph. The DataCite metadata schema also recognises RAiD as a related identifier type, enabling explicit links between DataCite records and RAiDs.

A DataCite project DOI does not provide the same benefits as using RAiD. It can provide global resolution, kernel metadata and links to related entities, but it does not by itself provide the RAiD-specific metadata model, federated registry, authenticated multi-party editing or project change history.

Swedish national identifiers

Institutional identifiers

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Swedish universities and research organisations may assign project numbers or case numbers (diarienummer). These may be employed in financial systems, CRIS systems and CMS systems or serve as internal database identifiers. These identifiers are essential for local administration and may remain stable within the system that issued them. They are also commonly referenced in formal documentation and agreements between organisations.

Such identifiers normally have a limited namespace, are not globally resolvable and may identify different entities in different systems: an application, administrative case, financial account, contract, award or research project. The same project may consequently accumulate several local identifiers, while an award number created by a funder is sometimes used as a proxy for the project itself, possibly creating an overlap with identifiers from grant-management systems.

When creating workflows for creating and maintaining globally resolvable research activity PIDs such as RAiD, local identifiers may be exposed as alternate identifiers when relevant, together with the issuing organisation and identifier type.

Other related entities

CERIF Project

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In the CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) metadata standard created for modeling research in CRIS/RIMS systems, the Project, or cfProj, entity corresponds to a research project or activity in the CERIF data model.

While not being a PID in itself, the structured and interoperable metadata created when working within CERIF compliant tools and systems will facilitate responsible reuse of research information and active implementation of research activity PIDs such as RAiD.

OpenAIRE Graph Project

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The OpenAIRE infrastructure performs large-scale indexing of research outputs. It aims to enable analysis by implementing the Scientific Knowledge Graphs paradigm through OpenAIRE Graph.

As a part of the OpenAIRE data model, the Project entity is in theory encapsulating research projects and activities. A Project identified and indexed by OpenAIRE will receive an internal OpenAIRE Project identifier, such as: fwf_________::0276f19f569783c6d1976ee3f09b408b

The corresponding OpenAIRE Graph entry will then be available at: https://explore.openaire.eu/search/project?projectId=fwf_________::0276f19f569783c6d1976ee3f09b408b

A review of entities indexed to date will reveal a nearly exclusive focus on externally funded projects. This means that currently, the entity is in practice more closely related to the funding and grants concept.

However, in the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers, the infrastructure is supporting the CERIF Project metadata model and entity, where metadata on funding is optional. Therefore, it appears that the OpenAIRE infrastructure has committed to support a more inclusive research activity concept for future development and indexing.

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1. T. Suominen, C. Tatum, S. Sipponen, W. Rydman, and S. Ross, "Piloting the use of RAiD in Research.fi," Procedia Computer Science, vol. 249, pp. 224--231, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2024.11.068. ↩

2. European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), "Research Activity Identifier Service (RAiD)," FAIRCORE4EOSC. 2025. Accessed: Sept. 03, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://faircore4eosc.eu/eosc-core-components/research-activity-identifier-service-raid ↩

3. DataCite, "Project Tracking and Identification," DataCite Support. 2026. Accessed: Aug. 26, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://support.datacite.org/docs/project-tracking-and-identification ↩