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RAiD Global Community Meetings recap — May 2026

29 May 2026 · Matthias Liffers

community meeting operating alliance ARDC SURF SDSC

On 20 May 2026, over 200 participants across three time zones joined the RAiD Global Community Meeting. Sessions were held for the Asia Pacific, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Americas regions, each featuring updates on RAiD’s growing global federation alongside use cases from research organisations actively adopting the identifier.

A highlight shared across all three sessions was the first public announcement of the RAiD Operating Alliance — a new global governance body bringing together the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), SURF (Netherlands), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. The Operating Alliance will share responsibility for RAiD’s development and long-term sustainability as the federation expands.

Asia Pacific

The APAC session focused on the growth of the ARDC RAiD Service, which now supports 11 organisations across 19 service points in Australia and New Zealand, with 605 RAiDs minted to date. ARDC Product Manager Matthias Liffers highlighted the recently launched ORCID integration, which allows researchers to connect RAiD records directly to their ORCID profiles — with 233 ORCID iDs now linked. Two use cases were presented: Slaine O’Halloran from the Raine Study described how RAiD will help the long-running multigenerational cohort study capture its extensive network of partner organisations and research outputs in one place; and Jens Klump outlined AuScope’s plans to build a RAiD register to track outputs from its national geoscience research infrastructure, with a target launch of mid-2027.

Europe, Middle East, and Africa

The EMEA session featured an update from SURF, which is preparing to launch a RAiD Registration Agency for the Netherlands in Q3 2026, with plans to offer a broader European service in 2027. SURF shared lessons from piloting with Dutch universities, research institutes, and funders including NWO, emphasising that RAiD adoption looks different depending on whether the user is a researcher, a data steward, or a funder. Jenny Evans presented the ENACT project at the University of Westminster, which is building a specialist data service for practice research and exploring how RAiD can identify non-traditional research outputs. Tilo Mathes from ResearchSpace demonstrated how RSpace now automatically reports data export activities to a linked RAiD record, reducing manual effort for researchers.

Americas

The Americas session covered the US RAiD Pilot, funded by the US National Science Foundation through December 2026 and led by SDSC and Lyrasis, which has attracted 115 expressions of interest and is working with a growing group of pilot participants. Lee Wilson from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada presented the three-year national RAiD project, which is currently in its pilot phase and targeting a formal service launch by April 2028. Bryan Gee and Michael Shensky from the University of Texas at Austin shared their work exploring a RAiD integration with the Texas Data Repository (a Dataverse instance), describing both the opportunities and the current limitations as Dataverse works towards native RAiD metadata support.

Recordings and slides from all three sessions are available:

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