In recent years, the research world has shifted rapidly toward promoting the adoption of FAIR data and encouraging the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for a more open and interconnected research ecosystem. While there are many different types of PIDs in use, there are generally considered five key PID types:
- PIDs for people, i.e. researchers and contributors (e.g. ORCID iDs)
- PIDs for digital objects such as publications (e.g. DOIs)
- PIDs for research activities (e.g. RAiDs),
- PIDs for grants and funding awards (e.g. Grant DOIs) and
- PIDs for research organizations (e.g. ROR IDs)
In this post, we’ll discuss what ROR is, and why and how ORCID supports ROR, the Research Organization Registry as our preferred PID for organizations.
ROR hosts a global, community-driven registry that uniquely identifies organizations. This free and open PID service was launched in 2019 by California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite, who jointly fund and govern ROR. ROR has since become an established and widely-adopted trusted PID service for identifying research organizations and currently includes more than 110,000 of them. ROR IDs and metadata are openly available under a CCO waiver, and ROR offers both a free-to-use REST Application Programming Interface (API) and a downloadable dataset of the entire registry.
ROR has become the standard identifier for organizations in ORCID records. Since ORCID adopted ROR in 2021, more than 4.5 million ROR-associated affiliations have been added to over 3 million ORCID records, and the percentage of affiliations without identifiers in the ORCID Registry has dropped. Currently, about 80 percent of new affiliations created in ORCID are linked to ROR IDs.
Compounding benefits of ROR and ORCID
ORCID has been hard at work developing features that incorporate ROR into the ORCID user experience. This year, we launched a tool within the ORCID record that suggests an affiliation to new ORCID users by looking at the user’s email domain and matching it to an organization in ROR. This makes it easier than ever for new ORCID users to add an affiliation to their record. As a result, about 80% of newly created ORCID records now include an affiliation, significantly increasing the overall proportion of ORCID records with affiliation information.
ROR data has also helped us improve the accessibility of the ORCID Registry. In their new schema v2, ROR added support for multilingual names and acronyms, which we have incorporated into ORCID’s affiliation search feature, enabling researchers to search for their organizations in their own language.
“ORCID was a key player in the community collaborations that defined the early vision for ROR, and provides an important function today in enabling meaningful connections between researchers, organizations, and their outputs and activities. Supporting the exchange of open metadata across systems and the improvement of metadata at scale requires broad community participation, and we are pleased to collaborate with ORCID in these efforts,” said ROR’s Director, Maria Gould.
To help support the continued growth of this key PID provider, ORCID increased its financial commitment to ROR in 2023. In 2024, ORCID is once again increasing financial support for ROR with a contribution of $150,000, adding to the core sustaining support provided by California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite.
“ROR plays an important part in the broader open PID ecosystem, allowing institution names to be standardized and disambiguated and affiliations to be captured and linked to research outputs,” said ORCID’s Executive Director Chris Shillum. “Our continued financial support for ROR is a demonstration of our commitment to an open, interoperable PID infrastructure. We at ORCID feel it is our responsibility to help ensure that ROR remains sustainable for years to come to support the entire research community,”
ORCID members and ROR
If you’re interested in learning more about ORCID and ROR, you can watch last year’s webinar on “ROR and ORCID—Asserting Affiliations and Professional activities to ORCID Records” to see case studies of organizations, consortia, and service providers who are enriching ORCID records with ROR, including Stanford University’s CORES, New Zealand’s Royal Society Te Aparangi, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Our Better Together webinars organized in conjunction with ROR governing organizations Crossref and DataCite also often highlight ROR and give advice on how to make use of it.
Visit support.orcid.org to learn how to add affiliation data like employment information or education and qualifications to your ORCID record. Consortia members can also use the Affiliation Manager to add ROR-associated affiliations to ORCID records. Make sure your organization’s information is up to date in ORCID by searching for your organization’s ROR record and, if necessary, requesting a change.
Do your service providers use ROR? Do you manage a system that could integrate ROR? Visit ROR’s website at ror.org to learn more.
