Call for Community Review of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs)

The purpose of this document is to solicit community feedback on the Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs)that was submitted to INCF for endorsement as a standard. The document contains the INCF standards and best practices committee's review of RRIDs, and the criteria in which it was evaluated (open, FAIR, testing and implementation, governance, adoption and use, stability and support, extensibility and comparison to similar standards). For the next 60 days, we are seeking community feedback on RRIDs.

About RRIDs:

The RRID is a Persistent Unique Identifier assigned to help researchers cite key resources (antibodies, model organisms and software projects) in the biomedical literature to improve transparency of research methods. They are machine readable, free to generate and access, and consistent across publishers and journals. They are meant as a tool to improve scholarly communication and scientific reproducibility.

RRIDs are created by authoritative databases such as the Antibody Registry, Addgene, or Cellosaurus and their aggregation is supported by SciCrunch (http://scicrunch.org/resource). This aggregation provides one place for journals to send authors and there are clear instructions, a “cite this” button next to each resource that contains proper citation text for the methods section of a manuscript and a help desk. Over 100 journals have guides on how to use RRIDs and over 1000 have published RRIDs at the time of this document.

RRDs1

The full RRID syntax includes the unique identifier as well as pertinent information about the resource. For software, this includes the version or date accessed.

Steward: Dr. Anita Brandowski, SciCrunch, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Relevant publications:

Bandrowski et al. (2015) The Resource Identification Initiative: A cultural shift in publishing.
Co-Published: Journal of Comparative Neurology [10.1002/cne.23913], Brain and Behavior [10.1002/brb3.417], F1000 Research [10.12688/f1000research.6555.2], and Neuroinformatics [10.1007/s12021-015-9284-3].
Babic et al (2019) Incidences of problematic cell lines are lower in papers that use RRIDs to identify cell lines. Elife. [10.7554/eLife.41676]
Bandrowski & Martone (2016) RRIDs: A Simple Step toward Improving Reproducibility through Rigor and Transparency of Experimental Methods. Neuron. [10.1016/j.neuron.2016.04.030]

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Links:

RRIDs application documents

Response to INCF reviewers

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Review report:

Overall, the committee felt that RRIDs are a strong candidate for INCF endorsement and should be put forward to the community for public review. It is open, has strong documentation, is well conceived and executed, supports FAIR reasonably well, has evidence of widespread community support and use outside of the core group involved in its specification and development. At present, there are approximately 1000 journals endorsing and 3000 utilizing RRIDs. The delay between the initial review and community review was due to the need to establish a governance framework for RRIDs. The INCF Standards and Best Practices (SBP) Committee commends the steward’s efforts to implement the governance recommendations provided. Below, you will find the SBP Committee’s report on how RRIDs address and fulfill INCF’s criteria for endorsement as a standard/best practice.

Review documentation:

RRIDs application documents

Response to INCF reviewers

Recommendation:
The committee unanimously recommended that RRIDs be put forward for community comment.

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Authors and Affiliations

Submitted for consideration: 14 April 2020

Initial review: 18 September 2020

Reviewers: Thomas Wachtler and Wojtek Goscinski

Authors: Anita Bandrowski and the INCF SBP Committee

Competing Interests

No competing interests were disclosed

Final date for community review is

15 Nov 2025

Review & Comment now

Keywords

Research resource identifiers

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Comments

370 Comments

Fred Atherden

Wed, 10/15/2025 - 16:47

eLife

eLife fully supports the proposal to endorse RRIDs as an INCF standard. As persistent unique identifiers, RRIDs reinforce FAIR principles and facilitate the accurate and transparent reporting of research methods. They are easily and broadly adopted in scholarly communication and are fervently championed by SciCrunch. To date eLife has published over 5000 articles containing more than 16500 (non-unique) RRIDs, and we encourage their use by authors publishing at eLife.