The Resource Identification Initiative supports NIH's new guidelines for Rigor and Transparency as these apply in biomedical publications. Authors are instructed to authenticate key biological resources: Antibodies, Model Organisms, and Tools (software, databases, services), by finding or generating stable unique identifiers. Like a library catalog, these identifiers stick around no matter if the company continues to sell the product or not. This persistence is required for good scholarship and forms a bridge between the static world of the scientific paper and the dynamic world of products and tools.