Starting today, funder names deposited in Crossref metadata without an identifier will be matched to ROR IDs, to support an open and connected Research Nexus. Funding information is an increasingly important part of the scholarly record. The improved matching strategy supports researchers, funders, institutions, and meta-researchers, who rely on that information to understand how research is supported and what outcomes that support produces.
In April 2025, we launched the metadata matching project, in order to add missing relationships to the scholarly metadata. We will do this by consolidating all existing and planned matching workflows, which enrich member-deposited metadata in Crossref. This unified service will result in a more complete research nexus. In this blog post, we share our latest milestone: developing and evaluating a strategy for matching funder metadata to Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers.
Itâs been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask âWhere do you work?â as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, âWhat is this author’s affiliation?â is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.
Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organisations.
A few months ago we announced our plan to deprecate our support for the Open Funder Registry in favour of using the ROR Registry to support both affiliation and funder use cases. The feedback weâve had from the community has been positive and supports our members, service providers and metadata users who are already starting to move in this direction.
We wanted to provide an update on work thatâs underway to make this transition happen, and how you can get involved in working together with us on this.
There is some overlap between the Open Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Open Funder Registry IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders when they appear in both registries. We aim to merge the two registries over time. We will ensure Crossref members can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the âNelson memoâ). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiersâand the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery. While this post does respond to the OSTP guidelines point-by-point, the information here applies to all funding bodies in all countries. It will be equally useful for publishers and other systems that operate in the scholarly research ecosystem.
The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” So far, everyone has heard of it – it’s a very well-known poem indeed. I then explain that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle, and that a villanelle is a poetic form something like a sonnet. So far, everyone also knows what a sonnet is, which is why I use that as a comparison, even though a villanelle isn’t all that much like a sonnet, in my opinion. They’re both poetic forms, however, with a particular standard number of lines and a particular standard rhyme scheme, so in that sense they certainly are alike.
In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organization Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff.
ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects. Crossref added support for ROR to its schema and REST API in 2021 and we are asking Crossref members to use ROR IDs for author affiliations in the metadata they deposit with Crossref. But this post is about how the Crossref community can support ROR in another way.
Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossrefâs progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. đŚ
The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants. So today’s news is that ROR IDs are now connected in Crossref metadata and openly available via our APIs. đ
