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The ARK Alliance (arks.org) supports global ARK (Archival Resource Key) persistent identifier infrastructure on behalf of research and scholarship. ARKs have served as stable, trusted references for information objects since 2001. As of 2025 some 15.3 billion ARKs have been created by over 1720 organizations — libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, government agencies, and vendors.

ARKs identify anything digital, physical, or abstract. They are open, mainstream, non-paywalled, decentralized persistent identifiers that can be created by an organization as soon as it is registered with a NAAN (Name Assigning Authority Number). Once registered, an ARK organization can create unlimited numbers of ARKs.

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