We applied for, and were assigned, our very own RRID for the UCSC Chemical Screening Center, which is SCR_021114.

Research Resource Identifiers are persistent and unique identifiers assigned to help researchers cite key resources in the biomedical literature. They are free to obtain and access, machine readable, and consistent between journals/publishers. Resources can be facilities, antibodies, model organisms, plasmids, cell lines, tools, software, and databases. Over 20,000 research papers now cite RRIDs. RRIDs are cataloged by the SciCrunch RRID Portal.

The goal behind using RRIDs is to improve transparency and reproducibility of research methods and enable tracking and reuse of research resources. The need for this was identified by an NIH-funded initiative started at UCSD in 2008. Other participants in the effort include NIDA, SfN, F1000, Cell Press, and ORCID. The Resource Identification Initiative, a cross-publisher effort, has led to RRID being adopted (and often required) by journals in their manuscripts’ methods sections.

To illustrate the usefulness of RRIDs, consider an example (in this case, RRID used for an antibody):

Which papers used this antibody in a western blot experiment, is currently an unreasonably difficult task, but with RRIDs implemented across many journals, the task would only involve putting in the RRID and the term western blot into PubMedCentral or google scholar, no matter what the antibody company choses to call itself this week and no matter whether the antibody has been discontinued or sold to another company. – eLife article about RRID.