UC3 New Year Series: Persistent Identifiers in 2026

CDL’s persistent identifier portfolio, which includes the Research Organization Registry (ROR), EZID, Name-to-Thing (N2T), and the Collaborative Metadata (COMET) initiative, saw strong continued progress and steady technical improvements across its service. Together, these complementary efforts support more connected and efficient research infrastructure, one where persistent identifiers link researchers, institutions, and scholarly outputs in ways that reduce duplication, lower costs, and increase the impact of everyone’s work. As we head into 2026, I’m pleased to share a look at what we accomplished over the past year and what’s coming next.

ROR

ROR is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research and funding organizations, operated as a collaborative initiative by the California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite. As a free, trusted, and openly available service, ROR has become the standard for organizational identification in the scholarly communications ecosystem. The story of ROR in 2026 is one of rising to meet its place in the world while also making investments to carry the service forward for years to come.

In 2025, ROR processed over 12,000 user-submitted curation requests, a 50% increase over 2024, with trends suggesting continued growth for the year ahead. To meet this rising demand, we are undertaking a top-to-bottom rewrite of our curation review and data publication processes, unifying previously separate workflows and introducing new forms of automation, monitoring, and prioritization. Together, these changes will help support a growing number of curators in attending to the community’s needs while maintaining the high-quality metadata for which ROR is known.

These efforts support strong international growth and adoption of ROR over the past year. Our focus on improving the representation of Japanese organizations in 2025 proved well aligned with broader trends, as the APAC region saw the largest overall increase in adoption of ROR this past year. This work was supported by strengthened partnerships and extensive data reconciliation work with national-level organizations in this region, including new collaborations with government partners in South Korea. We will continue to support this momentum in the APAC region while also pursuing opportunities in other areas of growing adoption, such as Africa and Latin America.

Concurrent with this curation-focused work, ROR will invest in a number of core technology upgrades to ensure its applications and services are stable and performant in the long term. The introduction of a new API caching layer and the efficient single search matching strategy this past year have already yielded significant performance improvements, giving us the opportunity to double down on these investments by moving all of our codebases to the most modern versions of the frameworks and libraries in which they depend. This work will also include a refresh of our UI, migrating it to a modern JavaScript framework that allows us to take full advantage of the ROR API’s features, including its advanced search capabilities.

COMET

The COMET (collaborative metadata initiative, launched in November of 2024, seeks to address critical challenges in the quality and completeness of persistent identifier metadata, with an initial focus on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Currently, only record owners can update DOI metadata, meaning that those with enrichments to contribute must maintain their own improved versions of this metadata in separate systems, duplicating effort and fragmenting the representation of research outputs. COMET addresses this by creating pathways for the community to contribute validated metadata improvements directly to DOI records, unlocking new value and efficiencies at the source.

After an initial taskforce phase that drew together over 100 partners from universities, government organizations, publishers, and infrastructure services, COMET issued a community call to action in March of 2025, soliciting resources to move its work from concept into practice. This was met with responses from our very own UC3, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), and DataCite, all of whom agreed to contribute to moving the project into a pilot phase where its model for community-driven metadata enrichment could be proven out. Work on this new phase began in May 2025 and, over the course of seven months, achieved remarkable results across a set of pilot projects.

These pilots tackled some of the most persistent gaps in DOI metadata, with two focused on the nearly 3-million-work arXiv corpus. The first developed a high-precision affiliation extraction method that produced 12.1 million new affiliation entries, matched to ROR IDs, addressing long-standing barriers to institutional impact tracking. A companion effort bridged arXiv preprints stored in DataCite with published works in Crossref, recovering over 730,000 new preprint-to-publication connections, nearly doubling the total of those previously linked. A separate pilot, conducted with European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Wageningen University & Research, tested a lightweight automated reconciliation of institutional Current Research Information System (CRIS) data against metadata in OpenAlex, an open catalog of the global research system. This reconciliation strategy returned approximately 90% of each institution’s manually-curated works while also discovering many not previously found through this curation. Where reconciliation failed, the process also surfaced specific metadata issues that resulted in the gaps, demonstrating that this automated method could match and even improve upon manual curation efforts with a fraction of the time and effort.

Taken together, these pilots confirmed that community-coordinated enrichment work, built around shared methods and PID integration pathways, can produce trusted, reusable outputs at scale. In 2026, COMET will focus on formalizing the processes and structures that emerged from these pilots while extending its collaborations to new partners and domains. To stay apprised of future work, subscribe to COMET’s email list to receive up-to-date news or follow its LinkedIn page for updates.

EZID, ARKs, and N2T

EZID and N2T are complementary persistent identifier services that enable reliable, long-term access to research outputs. EZID provides identifier creation and management services focused on ARKs and DOIs, while N2T serves as a global resolver that ensures identifiers remain reliable and actionable over time. UC3 also provides the development resources that support the creation and management of Name Assigning Authority Numbers (NAANs), the organizational identifiers that underpin all of global ARK resolution.

In 2025, EZID completed a series of updates to its user interface to bring it into compliance with modern accessibility standards, ensuring that all users can effectively make use of the service. We also added support for the new DataCite schema, v4.6, keeping EZID up-to-date with the latest standards in DOI metadata management. Alongside these improvements, we made significant investments in NAAN curation workflows, introducing new automation that allows for more efficient and responsive management of these identifiers and their metadata.

Following the successful rewrite of N2T as a modern Python service, we are now working on moving it into a containerized deployment setup, an effort that is part of a broader push across both EZID and N2T toward modern deployment practices that support continuous integration and delivery. Together with adding support for the new DataCite schema coming later this year, these investments will further improve reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency across our services.

As I hope this all conveys, it has never been a more exciting time to both help build and take part in the persistent identifier ecosystem. Here’s to 2026 and all the promising work ahead for the University of California community and beyond!