The Decentralized Archival Resource Key (dARK) project addresses challenges faced by institutions in the Global South regarding persistent identifier (PID) systems, including high costs and reliance on centralized models. dARK is a decentralized, scalable, and cost-effective solution operating on a blockchain-based infrastructure, ensuring compatibility with existing PID systems like DOIs while fostering equitable access to scholarly communication resources. In 2024, dARK transitioned from proof of concept to its first production phase, integrating with Brazil’s Oasisbr, a federated platform aggregating over 5 million digital objects. During the pilot phase, 400,000 objects received dARK identifiers, marking significant progress toward the goal of full coverage. Key innovations, such as hyperdrive middleware for metadata transfer and integration with the ARK Alliance’s global resolver, enhance discoverability and ensure long-term PID preservation. This presentation explores dARK’s evolution, technological advancements, and its transformative impact on the open science ecosystem, inviting stakeholders to contribute to a more inclusive and sustainable scholarly communication model.

Lunaris is a national data discovery service for Canada. Providing complete and structured, preferably standards-based, metadata for data records enables Lunaris and other discovery services to effectively find potentially relevant datasets, filter them to concretely identify Canadian datasets, and crosswalk them to an internal metadata schema. We will focus on practical challenges related to our mandate of harvesting Canadian datasets, but our recommendations will be applicable to discovery of other subsets of research data at large.

The benefits of persistent identifiers (PIDs) are often discussed in an abstract or aspirational way. Lunaris’ experience harvesting repositories reveals concrete scenarios in which PIDs are critical to effectively handling repository metadata.

This presentation will outline our procedure for harvesting a new repository and highlight situations in which repositories’ use of PIDs and other structured metadata improve this procedure, making explicit recommendations for structured metadata use. We will then discuss the way specific PIDs and other metadata elements enable us to help our users effectively discover records in this cross-repository environment. Finally, we will discuss future work in handling emerging PIDs and metadata standards.

The data sharing definitions and openness must consider, additionally, issues of institutional interest, national sovereignty, intra- and extra-country asymmetries and of reciprocity, in order to avoid increasing inequalities in the scientific and technology and population access to knowledge. In biodiversity context, Brazil has a huge relevance once the country occupies almost half of South America and is the country with the greatest biodiversity in the world. SiBBr Repository was developed as the Brazilian national repository of data and information on biodiversity, responsible for organizing, indexing, storing and making available data and information about biodiversity and Brazilian ecosystems, providing subsidies for scientific researches and government management related to conservation and sustainable use. This presentation will cover the results of a case study that aimed to bring out the challenges involved in understanding DOI attribution in biodiversity repositories: How DOI attribution to biodiversity materials in SiBBr can allow a relevant increase in the citations and visibility of Brazilian biodiversity data? Once the relevant context of SiBBr, serving as the Brazilian national GBIF node, it is mandatory to implement best practices in the SiBBr repository, for instance, including better characterization, identification, location and (re)use of data published.