In an advocacy bid to promote Persistent Identifiers and integration with Open Access Repositories, the Nigerian research community gained valuable insights into persistent identifiers (PIDs) at a workshop held as a side event during the WACREN 2024 Conference held at Abuja on 6 March 2024. The workshop brought together researchers, librarians and ICT Directors for a comprehensive discussion on the importance of PIDs and their potential to enhance research endeavours.

Ms Lombe Tembo, the Engagement Lead at ORCID provided insights on the benefits of ORCID to researchers and using ORCIDs to ensure research outputs are easily attributed to the researcher. Mr Bosum Obileye, Regional Engagement Specialist from DataCite, made a presentation on Metadata and Interoperability of PIDs. These discussions highlighted the critical link between different PIDs and how they work together to improve the visibility of research outputs. Sekafor Ankora from WACREN presented a preview of the upcoming deployment of ARK (Archival Resource Key) infrastructure from WACREN that NRENs could utilise as an alternative PID to DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

A demo on best practices of integrating PIDs with Open Access Repository was also presented to the audience, by showing the various ways ORCID can improve the usability of these repositories.

Owen Iyoha, CEO of Eko-Konnect co-ordinated the workshop and entertained several questions on implementation and best practices using PIDs.

The knowledge shared at this event will undoubtedly empower the Nigerian Research Community to harness the full potential of PIDs at their respective institutions.