Research institutions throughout Europe are engaged in research information management (RIM, sometimes known as Current Research Information Systems or CRIS) practices to aggregate, curate, and utilize information about the research conducted at their institutions. These efforts are rapidly scaling nationally and transnationally, as advancing technologies, standards, and networked information offer new opportunities for interoperability and discoverability. Team members from OCLC Research are collaboratively examining this evolving ecosystem in conjunction with LIBER, specifically investigating the adoption and integration of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and their role not only for disambiguation but also their current and future use for supporting interoperability in research information management. Our research study is a close examination of research management practices in three national contexts: Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, selected because they demonstrate useful parallels as well as differences that represent a host of emerging practices in research information management in Europe. In each of these countries, there is evidence of concerted efforts to develop shared research information management infrastructure operationalized at a group, regional, or national level. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with practitioners and stakeholders within universities, national libraries, and collaborative ICT organizations, we are developing three robust case studies of national RIM infrastructure as well as specific examples of RIM practices and PID integration. This project is intended to extend and complement existing research on institution-scale implementations of RIM in European research institutions, and provide university and research library leaders with useful insights on emerging practices and challenges in research management at institutional, group, national and even transnational scales. In our presentation, we will share the findings of our research, including our improved understanding of emerging interoperability concerns and the incentives to adopt persistent identifiers for researcher names, publications, and organizations. We hope that our research will inform our collective understanding of how institutions, nations, and the broader transnational community is collecting and managing complex information about the relationships between researchers, institutional affiliations, research funders, and their affiliated research outputs.