7 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 302 — 2021 outlets. PIDs enable disambiguation and discovery by providing machine-readable data that can be used to track individual components of research and establish connections between these components at a given point and over time. They can associate researchers to publications, capture networks of research collaborators, link a set of related publications to each other, or identify the downstream products of a grant-funded project, among other uses. PIDs can therefore help answer questions that are crucial for effective research discovery and management, such as: • How can I find all of the research published at my institution? • How can I identify the publications that resulted from a specific research project? • How can I locate the data set associated with a publication? • How can I track the downstream outcomes and impacts of a research project? • How can I record collaborations with other research institutions? • How can I ensure compliance with funder requirements for data sharing? As scholarship proliferates across digital platforms and discovery systems, PIDs have become the essential building blocks of the scholarly communications infrastructure for finding, accessing, and tracking research outputs. In this context, the PIDs most commonly used include: • PIDs for people • PIDs for outputs • PIDs for organizations • PIDs for funders and grants Within these categories, there may be more than one type of identifier. For instance, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a well-known global identifier for researchers. The ORCID registry is open and managed by a community-governed nonprofit organization.