ePIC

Persistent Identifiers Consortium

ePIC provides PID services for the European Research Community based on the handle system for the allocation and resolution of persistent identifiers. As the amount of stored data rapidly grows, it becomes increasingly necessary for scientific institutions to develop a strategy for long-term preservation of their scientific resources in order to ensure long-lasting accessibility. Data must be registered in repositories with timeless ways to reference them, regardless of alterations caused by data migration. This requires global resolution services to have a high degree of robustness and reliability in the long-term.

ePIC aims to set up and maintain a reliable joint service for registering, storing and resolving persistent identifiers (PID) based on handles for the research community. It has thus enabled partner data centres to register PIDs for any number of data objections and collections, which they store independently from their possible later use in publications. ePIC is designed to be a highly reliable, persistent and high-performance service, which is achieved through a strong network of data centres in Europe that helps to compensate for possible complications in the services of any singular data centre belonging to the network.

CSC has been a member of ePIC since 2009, and leverages the collaboration for service provision, but also to keep up with the evolution of the PID landscape and community and seek new opportunities for cooperation.