People are at the heart of Open Science. However, following the trail of a researcher’s contributions across publications, datasets, software, and projects can be surprisingly hard. Names appear in different forms, identifiers can be missing, and fragmented metadata often hides links that matter.

This is addressed in the OpenAIRE Graph by adding Persons as dedicated nodes. Where authors once appeared only as identifiers within research results, they can now be explored directly, along with their work, collaborations, affiliations, and links to funded projects.

Persons: What's new

Starting with the v11 release, the OpenAIRE Graph has been enhanced with metadata about persons. A dedicated process builds the person entities and their connections across the Graph. It starts from ORCID as a trusted identifier layer, then expands the view using information already captured in the OpenAIRE Graph.

In practice, this process:

• extracts a Person profile from ORCID
• links the person to their research and context by connecting authorship, collaborations, affiliations, and participation in funded projects (including evidence that come from project-related outputs such as deliverables and reports)
• adds bibliometric indicators, like total downloads and citations.

To dive deeper into implementation details, the workflow is documented at https://graph.openaire.eu/docs/graph-production-workflow/person_entity_pipeline

Beyond ORCID: expanding researcher coverage

While ORCID is the primary identifier anchoring Person entities in the Graph, coverage extends beyond researchers with a confirmed ORCID profile. The pipeline also resolves authorship for researchers with an ORCID-pending identifier, meaning authors whose ORCID association has been inferred but not yet confirmed, using AIDeR, OpenAIRE's own person name matching algorithm.

Affiliation data is drawn from a broader set of sources, including publisher metadata, DataCite, and OpenAlex, and matched against organisation identifiers through affro, OpenAIRE's affiliation resolution algorithm. This means that the Graph's people layer is not a simple mirror of the ORCID registry: it is enriched and extended through OpenAIRE's own disambiguation and matching infrastructure, with ORCID serving as the trusted anchor where available, not as a hard boundary on coverage.

By the numbers

This update adds a substantial new layer of people and relationships. In OpenAIRE Graph Dataset v11, Person-related connections include:

• 373 million co-author relationships
• 234 million authorship links between people and research outputs
• 7.4 million author affiliations
• 832,000 project participations linking people to funded research initiatives

Explore person-centred views

Person nodes make the OpenAIRE Graph easier to explore from a researcher’s perspective. In practice, this supports workflows such as:

• Exploring a person’s research landscape (outputs, collaborations, and funding context)
• Understanding collaboration patterns through co-authorship networks
• Linking contributors and outputs more robustly across heterogeneous sources
• Powering services for researchers, institutions, funders, and infrastructure providers

These connections are already used in MyResearchFolio, a new OpenAIRE service for holistic, FAIR-aligned researcher profiles. MyResearchFolio combines quantitative indicators from the OpenAIRE Graph with narrative CVs, helping present contributions, collaborations, career evolution, and context in one place.

Adding Persons as dedicated nodes is more than a technical enhancement. It helps make research contributions easier to find, connect, and understand across the Open Science ecosystem. By strengthening the links between people, outputs, organisations, and projects, the OpenAIRE Graph supports more reliable discovery, monitoring, and services for the communities that rely on open research information.