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Research infrastructures

Last updated: 2026-08-25

Research infrastructures are facilities, resources and services used by research communities to conduct research and foster innovation. In the PID landscape, this category can include centralised, distributed and virtual infrastructures, such as large-scale facilities, core facilities, service platforms, data repositories, databases, knowledgebases, data portals, scientific collections, archives, or computing resources.

Examples of research infrastructure entities that may be in scope for PID assignment include:

  • national and international research facilities;
  • independent infrastructure organisations, observatories, laboratories, archives and data centres;
  • distributed infrastructures and national nodes where the node is itself an identifiable infrastructure entity;
  • university or institute core facilities that are cited or acknowledged as research infrastructure resources;
  • research data repositories, databases, knowledgebases and data portals operated as infrastructures.

Research infrastructures are challenging PID targets, because the same name may refer to several different entities: a legal organisation, a distributed consortium, a national node or a service unit. Some of the PID principles and needs for research infrastructures may overlap with research organisations in general. PID assignment should therefore begin by defining the infrastructure entity that is being identified. A single infrastructure may need several complementary identifiers when different infrastructure-level entities need to be distinguished.

International PIDs and identifiers

ROR ID

🟢 Active

A ROR ID may be used to identify a research infrastructure when the infrastructure is represented as a research organisation or facility. This is relevant for national laboratories, international facilities, observatories, archives, data centres and other infrastructure entities that appear in research metadata as affiliations, operators, publishers, repository hosts, funders or organisational contributors.

ROR metadata includes organisation types and relationships. The ROR schema includes facility as one organisation type, and ROR guidance distinguishes facilities in ROR from core facilities in RRID. ROR is therefore appropriate when the PID target is an organisational or facility-level research entity, especially one that is functionally distinct from a parent university or agency1.

A ROR ID should normally not be used to identify every internal service, platform or core facility within a larger organisation. In such cases, the parent organisation may have a ROR ID, while the specific infrastructure entity is identified with a more appropriate PID, such as an RRID for a core facility.

Example: National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden has been assigned the ROR ID 00enajs79 which may be resolved at: https://ror.org/00enajs79

RRID

🟢 Active

A RRID (Research Resource Identifier) identifies various subtypes of research resources. RRIDs may be used for identification of a research infrastructure, especially a core facility that needs to be cited or acknowledged consistently in publications. In practice, the RRID system is mainly used within the life sciences and the physical sciences.

RRID and ROR have overlapping but distinct scopes for facilities. RRID is useful when a core facility should be identified as a research resource in methods sections, acknowledgements or reporting workflows. ROR is useful when the entity is an organisation or facility represented as an affiliation or organisational actor. A university-based microscopy, sequencing, imaging or mass spectrometry core facility may therefore have an RRID, while the parent university has a ROR ID1.

RRIDs should not be used as a general substitute for organisation identifiers, and it should not be interpreted as a PID for all resources that a research infrastructure operates. In this context, the RRIDs are limited to core facilities and comparable infrastructure entities that are within the RRID subtype scope.

Example: The Lund University Cell and Gene Technologies Core Facility has been assigned: RRID:SCR_028619 which may be resolved at: https://n2t.net/RRID:SCR_028619

re3data

🟢 Active

re3data.org is a global registry of data repositories. The scope of re3data includes research data repositories, data portals, databases or other services for depositing, preserving, finding and accessing research data2.

A re3data record identifies and describes a research data repository. The re3data record metadata includes repository names, URLs, subjects, keywords, contacts, repository types, certificates, access conditions, data upload conditions, data licences, metadata standards, repository languages and information on whether the repository provides persistent identifiers for deposited objects. The record will be assigned an internal identifier as well as a DOI suitable for citing and referencing. re3data record metadata is available as open metadata under CC0 through structured records and the re3data API.

For Swedish research infrastructures, re3data can support international discovery and policy compliance by making general and domain specific repositories visible in a global registry. The PID target is the repository record and the repository it describes, not the operator organisation, not the datasets deposited in the repository and not the entire research infrastructure if the repository is only one component of it.

Example: The KTH data repository has been assigned the repository identifier r3d100014787 which corresponds to the re3data registry DOI: https://doi.org/10.17616/R31NJNWJ

FAIRsharing

🟢 Active

FAIRsharing is a curated registry describing and interlinking standards, databases, and policies. The FAIRsharing databases category allows records that identify research infrastructures providing data resources, such as databases and data repositories3.

A FAIRsharing record identifies the registry description of a database, repository or similar resource and makes that description discoverable and citable through FAIRsharing record DOIs. FAIRsharing records can connect resources to maintainers, standards, policies, organisations and lifecycle status.

FAIRsharing should be treated as complementary to re3data. re3data is primarily a registry of research data repositories, while FAIRsharing covers standards, databases/repositories and policies and emphasises interlinking between them. For a research infrastructure providing a data-related service, it may be appropriate to maintain both a re3data record and a FAIRsharing record. FAIRsharing curation is handled both centrally and by external contributors, and individual users may become verified maintainers of FAIRsharing records.

Example: The Karolinska Institutet Data Repository (KI DR) has a FAIRsharing database type record at: https://doi.org/10.25504/FAIRsharing.e7a6b5

Swedish national level identifiers

Swedish organisation number (organisationsnummer)

🟢 Active

Swedish organisation numbers are relevant for Swedish data-related research infrastructures, since Sveriges dataportal uses them as the basis for recommended URIs for organisations publishing data.

In DCAT-AP-SE metadata, the publishing organisation is expressed with dcterms:publisher. This specifically identifies the responsible publishing organisation in the data portal context, not the research infrastructure, repository, database or data service as an infrastructure entity. When the Swedish organisation number identifies a parent organisation, a suffix may provide a venue for disambiguation.

To avoid duplicate actor records when the same publisher is harvested from several catalogues, Sveriges dataportal recommends a URI using the form http://dataportal.se/organisation/SE<orgnr>[-suffix], where <orgnr> is the 10-digit Swedish organisation number (without spaces or hyphens), while the optional suffix may be used to distinguish subdivisions of an organisation 4.

  1. A. Bandrowski and A. French, "Understanding RRID and ROR for Facilities," Research Organization Registry (ROR). 2024. doi: 10.71938/r7ar-eq11. ↩↩

  2. H. Pampel et al., "Re3data -- Indexing the Global Research Data Repository Landscape Since 2012," Scientific Data, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 571, 2023, doi: 10.1038/s41597-023-02462-y. ↩

  3. S.-A. Sansone et al., "FAIRsharing as a community approach to standards, repositories and policies," Nature Biotechnology, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 358--367, 2019, doi: 10.1038/s41587-019-0080-8. ↩

  4. DIGG -- Myndigheten för digital förvaltning, "Skördning av DCAT-AP-SE till Sveriges dataportal," Dokumentation - Sveriges dataportal. 2025. Accessed: Aug. 25, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://docs.dataportal.se/dcat/docs/harvesting/ ↩