The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations.

We are thrilled to introduce the newest member of the ROR pride: Joseph Rhoads joined the ROR team in September as our new Technical Lead.

DataCite

Advancing open PID infrastructure at scale: A new face and exciting projects for the ROR technical team

Have you ever wondered exactly what happens once you request a new ROR record or suggest a change to an existing ROR record? In this blog post, we take you through all the steps involved in ROR's open, community-driven process for making sure that the information in the ROR registry is complete and accurate.

Have you ever wondered exactly what happens once you request a new ROR record or suggest a change to an existing ROR record? In this blog post, we take you through all the steps involved in ROR’s open, community-driven process for making sure that the information in the Research Organization Registry is complete and accurate.

Journey of a Curation Request: What Happens When You Ask for an Update to ROR

Crossref

In this dual case study, we learn why the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) relies on OA.Report and why OA.Report relies on ROR to help HHMI track compliance with its open access policy. “Even back then [in 2019], the best option was to lean on a big, community-owned solution. And it’s been great to see ROR effectively become the standard, the clear way forward for identifying organizations.”  “We think ROR is terrific.

Case Study: How ROR in OA.Report Helps HHMI Monitor Open Access Policy Compliance

This blog post explores the difference between “core facilities” in RRID and “facilities” in ROR and provides guidance for those who run facilities on how to effectively use these identifiers. What is RRID and what is its scope? RRIDs (Research Resource Identifiers) help identify a wide variety of resources which are

 inputs to experiments

, especially biomedical experiments.

Understanding RRID and ROR for Facilities

University of California Office of the President

As we have crossed the mid-point of 2023, we’re taking a moment to reflect on what has already been a very busy year for ROR! ROR usage continues to skyrocket, with the ROR API seeing more than 23 million requests every month. ROR integrations are continuing to grow, and we’re showcasing specific implementations in a new case study series on the ROR blog.

ROR as community-supported infrastructure

California Digital Library

Digital Science

Earlier this year, the Org ID Working Group wrapped up their work. There was a lot of talk about governance, with options discussed for creating an entirely new independent organization; and/or having a looser group of stakeholders. After several months of discussion following the January stakeholder meeting in Girona, Spain, there was still no easy answer to the governance question.

The ROR of the crowd: get involved!

ROR Leadership Team

Since its launch in 2019, ROR has been charting a unique path toward sustainability.

Strengthening ROR’s sustainability model

In this installment of the ROR Case Studies series, we talk with Allyson Lister, Content and Community Lead for FAIRsharing, a cross-disciplinary registry of scientific standards, databases, and policies, about how and why FAIRsharing used ROR to help make organizations first-class citizens in their data model. Key quotations        “If we’re going to integrate with somebody like ROR, we have to commit to it, you know.

Case Study: ROR in FAIRsharing

We’re looking for your feedback on a draft proposal for managing ROR API client identification with ‘mailto’ parameters or API keys, and comments are open

 through October 4th, 2024

. Which option would you prefer? Does either option present a significant barrier for your use of the ROR API? Let us know! Since ROR’s launch in 2019, the ROR API has been provided at no cost and with no registration or credentials required.

How Should ROR Handle API Client Identification?

Symplectic

Exciting news: Symplectic, a global leader in research information management systems, has integrated ROR into its flagship platform, Symplectic Elements.

Symplectic Adds ROR Integration

Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where they currently use Funder IDs in their metadata.

Crossref has announced today that its members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where they currently use Funder IDs in their metadata. To learn more about using ROR IDs to identify funders, read ROR’s guide to the Open Funder Registry to ROR transition and ROR’s blog post on systems that are already using ROR for funder identification. Read the full text of the Crossref announcement below.

Using ROR IDs in Place of Funder IDs

Highlights of the 2025 ROR annual meeting sessions, including the Community Update, the panel on National PID Policies and Practices, and the session on Successes and Opportunities for ROR in the Asia-Pacific Region.

It’s been six years since the initial launch of ROR, and our Annual Community Meeting has become a welcome tradition for the ROR community in every new year. It’s a chance for us to reflect on the past year, look ahead to the coming year, and express our gratitude for the diverse and growing community of research and information professionals who use and support ROR.

Highlights from the 2025 ROR Annual Community Meeting

The fifth and final blog post about metadata matching by ROR’s Adam Buttrick and Crossref’s Dominika Tkaczyk outlines a set of pragmatic criteria for making decisions about metadata matching. Read all posts in the series on metadata matching. In our previous entry in this series, we explained that thorough evaluation is key to understanding a matching strategy’s performance.

Metadata Matching: Beyond Correctness

Web of Science Core Collection™ from Clarivate™ now includes Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers for the benefit of the global research community.

ROR Core Team

We are pleased to announce that Web of Science Core Collection™ now includes Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers. Users of the Web of Science™ can search for publications associated with an institution by using a ROR ID, and ROR IDs are available in organization profiles.

Clarivate Integrates ROR

Today, we are delighted to announce the launch of version 2 of the ROR schema and API!

Announcing Version 2 of the ROR Schema and API!

Adam Day, CEO of Clear Skies Ltd., discusses how he works to improve research integrity with tools like Papermill Alarm, why such tools can assist but can’t replace human investigators, and what’s so important for data scientists about free and open identifers like ROR. Key quotations        “Having institutional identifiers in there, it’s part of the puzzle. And it’s an important part of the puzzle. But there are limits to data analysis.

Case Study: Clear Skies, Research Integrity, Data Science, and ROR

Michael Parkin, data scientist at EMBL-EBI who helps maintain Europe PMC, explains why and how ROR  helps with assessing funding impact and tracking researcher collaborations. Key quotations        “As I mentioned, we can disseminate these ROR IDs, because we’ve added them to our own API. When you look at a grant record programmatically, you’ll see the ROR ID as part of that API response.

Case Study: How Europe PMC Uses ROR

The ROR Community turned out in force for our 2024 annual community meeting. Here are the highlights from ROR's fifth anniversary celebration, a community showcase of ROR users, and a panel on the importance of funding metadata.

Every year since 2019, we’ve celebrated ROR’s anniversary at the same time we hold our annual community meeting, updating everyone on what ROR has accomplished in the last year and expressing our gratitude for the help of the ROR community.

ROR's Fifth Anniversary: Highlights from the 2024 Annual Community Meeting

As we near the end of 2023, we are taking a moment to reflect on what has been another significant year for ROR. We are thrilled that ROR is widely recognized and trusted as the leading standard for organization identifiers.

ROR's Year in Review: 2023

ROR is ready to take on the important work that the Open Funder Registry has been doing: identifying research funders in a clean, consistent, comprehensive, and interoperable way. This post compares both registries and provides data showing that most of the Open Funder Registry records that see the most use already have equivalent records in ROR.

Following on the announcement that Crossref’s Open Funder Registry will be merging with ROR after 2024, we’d like to do a deep dive into the specifics of the evidence that ROR is ready to take on the important work that the Open Funder Registry has been doing: identifying research funders in a clean, consistent, comprehensive, and interoperable way. The main thing you need to know is that ROR’s data is up to the challenge.

How ROR and the Open Funder Registry Overlap: A Closer Look at the Data

After nearly a year of planning and community input, we are thrilled to release a beta version of ROR’s first major schema and API update, which is open to the public for testing through

 October 16, 2023.

Please visit our v2 beta test documentation for detailed information on what’s new and how to participate in the beta test.

Help Us Test v2 of the ROR API!

ROR is seeking a short-term curation support contractor as registry curation activities continue to expand. Please consider submitting an application and help spread the word to your networks! About ROR and registry curation     The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a community-led registry of open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifiers for every research organization in the world.

Now Hiring: Metadata Curation Support Contractor

Chris Hartgerink, the founder of Liberate Science, discusses why and how they integrated ROR into the modular publishing platform ResearchEquals for author affiliations in user profiles and Crossref DOIs and explains why they live streamed all eight hours of the work. Key quotations        “Integrating ROR just makes it very easy to match all these authors to the same institution.

Case Study: Why ResearchEquals Integrated ROR and Live Streamed It

Europe PMC, one of the largest providers of high-performance search tools for life sciences literature, has announced that its Grant Finder now incorporates Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs to help users find active and completed grants awarded by Europe PMC funders. Europe PMC provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources. It’s available to anyone, anywhere for free.

Europe PMC announces ROR integration into Grant Finder

Persistent identifiers are playing a key role in driving more robust research infrastructure and open science initiatives across Latin America.

Cross-posted by DataCite and ORCID


 Versión en español sigue abajo

Persistent identifiers are playing a key role in driving more robust research infrastructure and open science initiatives across Latin America.

PIDs and Open Science: Building Community in Latin America | PIDs y Ciencia Abierta: Construyendo comunidad en América Latina

2022 was a big year for ROR in many ways, but it was especially notable from a tech standpoint. In early 2022, we built tools and processes that allowed ROR to begin curating the registry separately from GRID, which quickly opened possibilities for tackling projects that had been waiting on the back burner until ROR became fully independent.

Handling Organization Status Changes in ROR

In 2024, ROR processed over 8000 curation requests, handled 14 million monthly requests to the ROR API, saw the number of downloads of the ROR dataset triple, and was a finalist for the ALPSP Innovation in Publishing Award: read on for more highlights from a banner year.

As 2024 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on where ROR is now, and the answer is unmistakable: ROR is just about everywhere.

ROR in 2024: Year in Review

The second blog post about metadata matching by ROR’s Adam Buttrick and Crossref’s Dominika Tkaczyk describes some basic matching-related terminology and the components of a matching process, then poses some typical product questions to consider when developing or integrating matching solutions. Read more about this important work here and in other posts in the matching series.

The Anatomy of Metadata Matching

In this post, we discuss a few common myths about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders.

The third blog post about metadata matching by ROR’s Adam Buttrick and Crossref’s Dominika Tkaczyk discusses a few common myths about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders. Read all posts in the series on metadata matching.

The Myth of Perfect Metadata Matching

Several widely used scholarly systems are using ROR IDs to identify and disambiguate funding organizations. In this post, we’ll give you a glimpse of how and why these systems use ROR IDs as funder identifiers. If you’re reading this post, you probably know that for the last ten years, the Crossref Open Funder Registry (formerly FundRef) has been the default identifier for funding organizations.

Using ROR for Funder Identification

Optica Publishing Group was one of the earliest publishers to send ROR IDs to Crossref in DOI metadata. In this interview, we speak with them to learn more about their rigorous processes for cleaning organization names.

Case Study: How and Why Optica Publishing Group Uses ROR

Crossref, with the help of CWTS Leiden, has just released an exciting update to their participation reports, adding metrics for both affiliations in general and ROR IDs in particular. Now Crossref members can easily see how well they’re doing in providing open affiliation metadata. Read the full text of the Crossref announcement below.

Re-introducing Participation Reports to Encourage Best Practices in Open Metadata

In this blog, the first one in a series about metadata matching, we will cover the very basics of matching: what it is, how we do it, and why we devote so much effort to this problem.

ROR Curation Lead Adam Buttrick has been working with Crossref Head of Strategic Initiatives Dominika Tkaczyk to explore improvements in automatic metadata matching strategies that can result in better metadata for everyone. Read more about this important work here and in other posts in the matching series.

Metadata Matching 101: What Is It and Why Do We Need It?

In January of 2022, DataSalon announced a full integration of ROR into its scholarly publishing analytics products MasterVision and PaperStack. DataSalon’s Client Services Director Andy Dobson sat down with us to tell us all about how they draw on fifteen years of data experience to match organizational affiliations in publisher data to ROR IDs.

Case Study: ROR in DataSalon's MasterVision and PaperStack

American Physical Society

The American Physical Society (APS) has become the largest society publisher to adopt ROR, incorporating it into their manuscript submission process and sending ROR IDs in author affiliation metadata to Crossref. “We’ve been eagerly supporting ROR since before it was ROR,” said APS Lead Data Analyst Arthur Smith.

American Physical Society Becomes Largest Society Publisher to Adopt ROR

Justin Barrett, Lead Machine Learning Engineer for OpenAlex at OurResearch, talks with ROR Technical Community Manager Amanda French and ROR Curation Lead Adam Buttrick about using ROR both as an identifier for institutions in OpenAlex and as a dataset for training machine learning models that enrich OpenAlex metadata.

Case Study: OpenAlex, ROR, and Machine Learning Models

In this case study we interview Tom Morrell, Research Data Specialist at Caltech Library and key contributor to the open source research data management system InvenioRDM, about Caltech’s early adoption of ROR IDs in their repository systems and why InvenioRDM is architected with ROR IDs for funders and author affiliations.

Case Study: ROR in Caltech Repositories

2022 has been a momentous year for ROR! We experienced significant growth, reached critical milestones, and established a foundation for long-term sustainability. As the year comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to reflect on our activities and give thanks to our community for supporting us along the way.

ROR's Year in Review: 2022

We’re looking for your feedback on a draft proposal for criteria to include additional external identifiers in ROR records, and comments are open

 through August 16th

. ROR records already include mappings to Crossref Funder IDs, Wikidata, ISNI, and GRID. What additional external IDs do you feel should be added? What criteria do you think other identifiers should meet in order to be added to ROR?

ID Ideas: Adding New External Identifiers to ROR

Four years ago, ROR was first introduced to the world at an open community meeting the day before PIDapalooza. Since then, we have continued to celebrate ROR’s anniversary every year with a big public event to bring together the broad network of ROR users and supporters and reinforce ROR’s commitment to developing open, sustainable, community-driven infrastructure.

ROR Turns Four: Highlights from the 2023 Annual Community Meeting

We are thrilled to introduce a new member of the ROR pride: Riley Marsh joined the ROR team in August as our new Metadata Manager. As Metadata Manager, Riley will support the day-to-day activities of curating the ROR registry, including triaging incoming requests and processing changes for new registry releases.

Welcome Riley Marsh, Metadata Manager

Maria Gould

We are thrilled to introduce a new member of the ROR pride: Amanda French has joined ROR as our full-time Technical Community Manager. Amanda is a well-known community manager and project director in the digital humanities and scholarly communication sphere.

Welcome Amanda French, Technical Community Manager

The ROR registry has grown!

We are excited to announce a new ROR registry release. With this update, the registry has grown to 102,559 records. This update is really exciting for many reasons. But we know some of you may be eager to skip ahead and check out the update right away.

ROR-ing on our own: Announcing our first independent registry update

ROR is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join as our Technical Lead, based at DataCite. You will be leading, developing, and architecting ROR services and infrastructure. ROR is a collaborative effort with resourcing from multiple organizations.

Job Posting: ROR Technical Lead

Earlier today, GRID announced that it will discontinue its schedule of public releases in Q4 2021. This decision marks an important and exciting milestone in the evolution of both organization registries.

ROR and GRID: The Way Forward

Dominika Tkaczyk

ROR launched in January 2019 with records for nearly 100,000 research organizations, all with unique IDs and associated metadata. ROR data is useful for a variety of reasons and for a variety of users, including both humans and machines. It is essential for ROR to have robust mechanisms for searching, retrieving, and filtering.

Untangling Affiliation Strings with the ROR API

ROR is the Research Organization Registry, a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world.

Help Build Open Infrastructure for Organization Identifiers: A Call to Support and Sustain ROR

An update on the progress of the Org ID initiative led by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID.

John Chodacki

Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry.  The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities.

Org ID: a recap and a hint of things to come

Amanda French

This conversation with Eric Olson of the Center for Open Science is the first in a new series of interviews, “Case Studies in ROR Integration,” a series designed to provide in-depth detail on why and how people are choosing to integrate ROR IDs into their systems.

Case Study: ROR in the COS Open Science Framework

ROR is excited to welcome three new Steering Group members: Lautaro Matas, Kathleen Shearer, and Chris Shillum. Inaugurated in late 2019, the ROR Steering Group is an advisory body that supports the registry’s strategic planning and decision-making activities. Steering group members provide feedback on ROR strategy and help drive awareness and adoption of ROR IDs through their respective networks and communities.

ROR Welcomes Three New Steering Group Members

As we announced previously, ROR launched a fundraising campaign in October to ensure the registry’s long-term sustainability. We are grateful for the community supporters who have already contributed to this campaign. The first round of supporters was announced a couple of weeks ago.

A Note of Thanks from ROR

We’re more than halfway through 2020, and it has already been a year like no other. In the midst of global upheaval and uncertainty, work on the Research Organization Registry continues. Building and sustaining community and connections through open scholarly infrastructure seems more important than ever.

Sustaining and Strengthening ROR

ROR is an open registry for every research organization in the world, aiming to solve the problem of identifying which organizations are affiliated with which research outputs.

ROR development update: Building and growing an open registry of organizations

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right! Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.

Hear us ROR! Announcing our first prototype and next steps

ROR supports parent-child organizational hierarchies as well as other types of relationships between organizations. This blog post explains how organizational hierarchies and relationships are expressed in ROR metadata, offers statistics on hierarchies and relationships in ROR, summarizes ROR's curation practices for hierarchies and relationships, and gives examples of real-life use cases of ROR hierarchies and relationships.

One common question we receive about ROR registry records is whether they reflect organizational hierarchy and relationships between organizations – yes, they do! ROR does indeed support parent-child organizational hierarchies as well as other types of relationships between organizations.

Parents, Children, and Other Relationships in ROR Records

ROR Curation Lead Adam Buttrick is staying at ROR but moving from Crossref to CDL, which means there's a new position to fill at Crossref. Read more about the Metadata Manager position and consider applying yourself!

ROR is fortunate to have a small but mighty team that strives every day to make ROR as good as it can be and to support the diverse needs of our global community. Ever since ROR was established, we’ve continually adjusted our resourcing and staffing to keep up with ROR’s needs and to align ROR activities with the needs and priorities of ROR’s operating organizations.

Change, Continuity, and New Positions on the ROR Team

ROR is hiring! We are looking for a full-time Technical Community Manager to expand the adoption and integration of ROR throughout the global scholarly communications ecosystem. ROR (Research Organization Registry) is a community-led initiative to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. It is jointly managed by DataCite, Crossref, and California Digital Library.

ROR Is Hiring a Technical Community Manager

ROR is releasing our first-ever Annual Report. Adopting the model of annual reports distributed by nonprofit organizations, this document aims to provide an overview of ROR’s progress in 2020 and a preview of work to come in 2021.

ROR is a specific type of identifier and a specific type of initiative that does not always fit neatly into pre-defined notions and categories. The registry’s focus on providing an open, noncommercial, and community-driven solution to the problem of identifying research organization affiliations sets it apart from similar types of organization identifiers.

ROR’s 2020 Annual Report: A ROR-port on the past year and a look to what’s next

Scholastica has incorporated ROR IDs into its Peer Review System, Production Service, and Open Access Publishing Platform. In this interview with Cory Schires, Scholastica co-founder and CTO, we discuss the two phases of ROR implementation, the pros and cons of displaying ROR IDs, what makes sense about ROR's level of granularity, and the importance of reliable APIs.

Scholastica, a journal publishing technology solutions provider, has incorporated ROR IDs into its Peer Review System, Production Service, and Open Access Publishing Platform. In this interview with Cory Schires, Scholastica co-founder and CTO, we discuss the two phases of ROR implementation, the pros and cons of displaying ROR IDs, what makes sense about ROR’s level of granularity, and the importance of reliable APIs.

Case Study: ROR in Scholastica Products

The scholarly community depends on a network of open identifier and metadata infrastructure. Content identifiers and contributor identifiers are foundational components of this network. But an additional component has long been missing from this picture: open, stakeholder-governed infrastructure for research organization identifiers and their associated metadata. ROR launched in January 2019 with the specific aim of filling this gap.

Aligning ROR with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

In this post, we highlight ROR integration work focused on scholarly publishing, an area that depends heavily on the identification of institutional affiliations, and we welcome Liz Krznarich as ROR's new Adoption Manager.

ROR offers an open and community-driven solution for tracking research outputs by institutions. ROR identifiers for research organizations are not meant to exist on their own. Their potential will be fully realized with wide adoption of ROR IDs in scholarly infrastructure and metadata. Although ROR is still relatively new, ROR IDs are already being integrated and used in various ways.

The Path to ROR Adoption in Scholarly Publishing and Beyond

Daniella Lowenberg

How many datasets have been published in Dryad from researchers at the University of California? This question is surprisingly complicated.

ROR-ing Together: Implementing Organization IDs in Dryad

ROR had a party in Portugal last month! Sixty friends - some new, some old - came together in Lisbon on the eve of PIDapalooza 2020 to celebrate ROR’s unofficial first birthday, marking one year since the registry debuted at a community meeting in Dublin in January 2019.

ROR-ing Together in Portugal: A Community Celebration

Metadata Game Changers

Ted Habermann

Version 4.3 of the DataCite Metadata Schema released during August, 2019 included (among other things), the capability to provide persistent identifiers for affiliated organizations in the metadata (Dasler and deSmaele, Identify your affiliation with Metadata Schema 4.3, 2019). This capability builds on the work and enthusiasm generated by the ROR Community that has championed the concept of open organization identifiers for several years

Early Adopters of Organization Identifiers in DataCite

ROR is thrilled to announce that we are welcoming new members to the ROR Steering Group.

Meet the ROR Steering Group

Professor Cameron Neylon of Curtin University talks telephones, power outlets, chat services, persistent identifier education, federated versus centralized curation, providing actionable information to universities, and why the COKI Open Access Dashboard relies on ROR.

Case Study: The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative and ROR

OpenAlex has added a new metadata matching strategy co-developed by ROR and Crossref to its affiliation matching processes: ROR is also investigating the prospect of incorporating this new matching strategy into the ROR API in 2025. If you’ve been reading our recent series of blog posts about metadata matching, you know that automatic metadata matching at scale is a topic dear to our hearts.

Faster Affiliation Matching at Scale

Crossref has announced a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry and merge it with ROR in order to make workflows more efficient for all concerned. ROR and Crossref are working closely together on this important initiative, and we’re happy to answer any questions that users of the Funder Registry may have.

Open Funder Registry to Transition to ROR

Rockefeller University Press has incorporated ROR into many aspects of their workflow, and their platform provider Silverchair was there to help. This case study is based on the presentation about this integration given at the December 2022 ROR Community Call by Rob O’Donnell, Senior Director of Publishing at RUP, and Emily Hazzard, Product Operations Analyst at Silverchair.

Case Study: ROR at Rockefeller University Press and Silverchair

ROR had a birthday last week and marked the occasion just like anyone else celebrating a birthday during the pandemic: with a virtual party! More than eighty attendees from around the world came together for the now third annual ROR community meeting, held this year on Zoom across two sessions to reach ROR’s global community in as many timezones as possible.

Unmute to ROAR! ROR's third annual (and first virtual) community meeting

We are thrilled to announce that ROR has been selected by SCOSS as essential open infrastructure and will be highlighted in the latest SCOSS campaign, which kicked off this week. SCOSS - the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services - is an initiative that focuses on identifying non-commercial infrastructures that are key for open science and worthy of community investment.

SCOSS selects ROR as essential open infrastructure

ROR is looking for a data manager to lead metadata curation activities for the registry, including coordinating registry updates and maintenance, working with ROR’s community curation advisors, and developing and implement long-term curation policies and practices. This is an exciting time to join the ROR team and support ROR’s emerging independent, community-based curation model.  The job description and application instructions follow below.

Now Hiring: Metadata Curation Lead

The Research Organization Registry is a cross-organizational and multi-stakeholder initiative. ROR is run by a small group of steering organizations in collaboration with a broad network of community advisors and supporters.

What (and Who) Is the ROR Community?

In the same week that ROR celebrated its third birthday, PIDapalooza celebrated the fifth festival of persistent identifiers, also as a virtual event. Across three tracks, seven languages, and twenty-hour hours, PIDapalooza21 highlighted the latest updates from the wide world of persistent identifiers, with a focus how open infrastructure and rich metadata are key to harnessing the power of PIDs.

ROR-ing around the clock at PIDapalooza21

Some of the most frequent questions ROR receives are about what it means when an organization is in ROR, and how organizations end up in the registry in the first place. Many of you are understandably curious about how ROR records are added and updated. So, we thought this would be a good time to talk about how the registry is being maintained and how this process evolving. What does it mean if an organization is in ROR?

What Does it Mean to Be in ROR?

What a year it has been! Here's what happened in ROR's first year and what we plan for the future.

Flashback to one year ago, December 2018

: The ROR project team was putting the final pieces in place to launch the ROR MVR (minimum viable registry) in January. The ROR ID format was under discussion. A website was under construction. The purchase of the ror.org domain was being negotiated. We were getting ready to ROAR!

A Reflection on ROR's First Year

In the days following the ROR community meeting in Dublin, we had a chance to spread the word about ROR in presentations at PIDapalooza, the annual festival for persistent identifiers. Members of the ROR project team led an interactive session that included an affiliation-matching game to demonstrate the messiness of identifying and aligning metadata about an institution, and discuss how ROR IDs can address these challenges.

A ROR-ing recap from PIDapalooza

Adam Buttrick

The ROR registry includes unique IDs and associated metadata records for 100,000+ research organizations. Each one of these organizations has at least one name. Some of them have multiple names (one even has 15)! Organization names in ROR appear in 120 different languages and counting. Names in ROR are a key piece of metadata that helps with discovery and disambiguation of ROR records.

What's in a name? Handling name metadata in ROR

ROR launched a fundraising campaign in October to call on community stakeholders to pitch in toward supporting ROR’s long-term sustainability. While the overall goal of this campaign is to raise $175,000 from community supporters over the next two years, we set an initial target of $75,000 by the end of 2019.

Pride in Community: ROR Fundraising Update

ROR begins a new round of community fundraising

Since ROR launched in 2019, we have been charting a path to sustainability that leverages our broad community network and diversifies our funding sources. ROR is currently funded through a combination of in-kind support from its three operating organizations, project-based grant funds, and financial contributions from community members.

Let's Fund Open Infrastructure Together

The end of January 2022 marked the third anniversary of ROR’s launch at PIDapalooza 2019 in Dublin. Continuing with a tradition from the prior two years (2020 in Lisbon, and 2021 on Zoom), we marked the occasion with a community celebration to reflect on ROR’s progress and discuss the work that lies ahead. The 2022 ROR annual meeting consisted of 2 virtual sessions with around 100 community members from 26 different countries.

A New Year at ROR

ROR is excited to welcome two new members to its Steering Group this year:

 Joy Owango

from the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) and

 Natasha Simons

from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).

 About Joy Owango

Joy Owango is Founding Director of the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), the first African-based training centre to teach effective communication skills to

Joy Owango and Natasha Simons Join ROR Steering Group

We’ve run several calls for feedback in 2022, but here’s one you’ll definitely want to chime in on: our

 draft proposal of major changes to the ROR data model for schema version 2.0

. Comments are open until

 February 5, 2023

, and we hope to release version 2.0 of the ROR schema and API in late 2023.