Open Organization Identifiers for Open Repositories

As the use of DOIs and their associated metadata has proliferated throughout the research ecosystem to identify research outputs, linking research outputs to the organizations where they are affiliated remains challenging. ROR (Research Organization Registry) is a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. ROR’s specific focus is the affiliation use case—to unambiguously identify which organizations are affiliated with which research outputs. ROR launched in 2019, starting with seed data from GRID, and the registry now includes unique ROR IDs and associated metadata for approximately 97,000 research organizations. ROR IDs are already being implemented in systems and platforms across the scholarly communications ecosystem, and they are being supported in DataCite and Crossref metadata. Wide adoption of ROR in scholarly infrastructure and metadata will enable more efficient discovery and tracking of publications across institutions and funding bodies, and ROR’s open approach will ensure that this type of institutional data is available to all. This session will cover the basics of ROR, examples of early ROR implementations, and ways to get involved with the project.