Australian National Persistent Identifier (PID) Benchmarking Toolkit – Consultation Draft (June 2025)

This consultation draft introduces a benchmarking toolkit developed to support the implementation of the Australian National Persistent Identifier (PID) Strategy. Commissioned by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and developed by Digital Science, the report outlines SMART benchmarks aligned to the Strategy’s five key objectives. It offers a framework for evaluating PID adoption across the research ecosystem, covering research inputs (such as grants, facilities, and projects) and outputs (such as publications, datasets, and non-traditional outputs). The toolkit also presents benchmarking methods based on Australia’s ORCID adoption, illustrating how structured evaluation can inform national progress.

This report has been commissioned by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) — Australia’s leading research data infrastructure facility. The ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). In particular, the authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of:

Natasha Simons Director, National Coordination, ARDC
Lyle Winton, Program Manager, ARDC

Matthias Liffers, Product Manager (Persistent Identifier Services)
Linda O’Brien, Strategy Consultant for ARDC