We encourage our members to include ROR IDs in metadata in order to help make research organisation information clear and consistent as it is shared between systems. ROR IDs are essential to realise a rich and complete Research Nexus because they enable connections between research outputs and the organisations that support researchers.
“At Scholastica, we care about taking steps to enrich metadata â like adding ROR IDs, for example, on behalf of our customers, so they donât have to worry about the technical aspects of metadata collection or creation and can instead focus on maximizing the discovery benefits.” – Cory Schires, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Scholastica
Read the case study on ROR in Scholastica publishing products.
“If weâre talking about misconduct, then you might need to be able to contact the institution that the author is from. On an individual manuscript, it doesnât matter if thereâs no identifier â an address will do. But if you find some signal that is on manuscripts at scale, and youâve got thousands of them, well, you need an identifier. You canât go through them and try and search for every single one of those institutions.” – Adam Day, CEO, Clear Skies Ltd.
Read the case study on why Clear Skies uses ROR to help detect paper mills.
ROR is the Research Organization Registry—a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations. The registry currently includes globally unique persistent identifiers and associated metadata for more than 110,000 research organisations.
ROR IDs are specifically designed to be implemented in any system that captures institutional affiliations and to enable a richer networked research infrastructure. ROR IDs are interoperable with other organisation identifiers, including GRID (which provided the seed data that ROR launched with), the Open Funder Registry, ISNI, and Wikidata. ROR data is available under a CC0 Public Domain waiver and can be accessed at no cost via our public API and a data dump.
ROR is part of the open infrastructure we help runânot a separate organisation you need to deal with elsewhere. We co-founded it and operate it jointly with DataCite and the California Digital Library, and we launched it with seed data from GRID from Digital Science. Together we’ve invested in building an open registry of research organisation identifiers that can be embedded in scholarly infrastructure to link research to organisations effectively. ROR is not a membership organisation (or an independent legal entity at all!), and we charge no fees for use of the registry or the API. In fact, much of ROR’s day-to-day work is carried out by Crossref staff: as well as bringing 40% of its costs in-house following our board’s decision in 2022, we lead ROR’s community engagement and communications, its metadata curation and technical support, and its financial administrationâholding ROR’s shared funds and running its bookkeeping and annual audit. The terms of this shared stewardship are set out in our Memorandum of Agreement (PDF).
Dedicated ROR staffing (2024): Crossref 2.1 FTE, DataCite 1.1 FTE, California Digital Library 0.75 FTE.
For a long time, we only collected affiliation metadata as free-text strings, which made for ambiguity and incomplete data. An author affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley might give the name of the university in any of several common ways:
While it isnât too difficult for a human to guess that âUC Berkeley,â âUniversity of California, Berkeley,â and âUniversity of California at Berkeleyâ are all referring to the same university, a machine interpreting this information wouldnât necessarily make the same inference. If you are trying to easily find all of the publications associated with UC Berkeley, you would need to run and reconcile multiple searches at best, or, at worst, miss some data completely.
This is where an organisation identifier comes in: a single, unambiguous, standardised identifier that will always stay the same. For UC Berkeley, that would be https://ror.org/01an7q238.
In 2019, our members indicated that the ability to associate research outputs with organisations in a clean and consistent fashion was one of their most desired improvements to our metadata. In January of 2022, therefore, we added support for ROR IDs in our metadata schema and APIs. Since then, more and more members have been including ROR IDs in their metadata.
Publishers and service providers can implement ROR in their systems so that submitting authors and co-authors can easily choose their affiliation from a ROR-powered list instead of typing in free text. Authors themselves do not have to provide a ROR ID or even know that a ROR ID is being collected. This affiliation information can then be sent to us alongside other publication information.
Demo of collecting ROR IDs in a typeahead field
If the submission system you use does not yet support ROR, or if you don’t use a submission system, you’ll still be able to provide ROR IDs in your metadata. ROR IDs can be added to JATS XML, and our helper tools will start to support the deposit of ROR IDs. There’s also an OpenRefine reconciler that can map your internal identifiers to ROR identifiers.
ROR IDs for affiliations stand to transform the usability of our metadata. While itâs crucial to have IDs for affiliations, itâs equally important that the affiliation data can be easily used. The ROR dataset is CC0, so ROR IDs and associated affiliation data can be freely and openly used and reused without any restrictions.
The ROR IDs registered by members in their metadata are available via our open APIs so that they can be detected, analysed, and reused by anyone interested in linking research outputs to research organisations. Examples include:
The inclusion of ROR IDs in our metadata will eventually help all these entities make all these connections much more easily.
ROR is already working with publishers, funders and service providers who are integrating ROR in their systems, mapping their affiliation data to ROR IDs, and/or including ROR IDs in publication metadata. Libraries and institutional repositories are also beginning to build ROR into their systems and to send ROR IDs to us in their metadata. See the growing list of active and in-progress ROR integrations for more stakeholders who are supporting ROR.
If you deposit metadata with us via XML, see our guide on Affiliations and ROR for instructions on how to include author affiliations and ROR IDs.
For further information on how ROR IDs are supported in our metadata, you can take a look at this .xsd file (under the âinstitutionâ element) or in this journal article example XML. ROR also has some great help documentation for publishers and anyone else working with the ROR Registry.
Get in touch with us if you have questions about ROR, want to add ROR IDs to your metadata, or otherwise get more involved. You can also ask any questions on our community forum.
