About

What is ROR?

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations. ROR makes it easy for anyone or any system to disambiguate institution names and connect research organizations to researchers and research outputs.

Organizations are not static entities. They change their names, merge, split, shut down, and re-emerge, and this makes it difficult to connect research organizations to research outputs and researchers. A persistent identifier for research organizations makes this easier.

ROR is the first and only organization identifier that is openly available (CC0 data available via an open REST API and public data dump), specifically focused on identifying affiliations in scholarly metadata, developed as a community initiative to meet community use cases, and designed to be integrated into open scholarly infrastructure. It is the default identifier supported in Crossref DOI metadata, DataCite DOI metadata, and ORCID.

ROR is used in journal publishing systems, data repositories, funder and grant management platforms, open access workflows, and other research infrastructure components to disambiguate institutional affiliations, improve discovery and tracking of research outputs by affiliation, and facilitate OA publishing workflows, among other use cases.

FAQs

Looking for basic information about ROR? Check out our frequently asked questions for answers to questions about what kinds of organizations ROR includes, how ROR relates to other organizational identifiers, how to use ROR, and how information in ROR is added and modified.

Governance

ROR is operated as a collaborative initiative by California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite. The three ROR governing organizations collectively assume and share responsibility for ROR governance, operations, resourcing, and decision-making. These responsibilities are defined in a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).

Responsibility for ROR is designed and premised on the following core principles:

• ROR is a collaborative, open infrastructure initiative and service. 
• ROR is not an independent organization or legal entity. 
• ROR is committed to following the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).
• ROR cannot be governed by, purchased by, controlled by or sold to a commercial entity.
• The ROR governing organizations agree to not transfer control of any aspect of ROR or the ROR system to a commercial entity.

Financials

ROR’s day-to-day financial activities are administered by the Crossref accounting team on behalf of ROR. Crossref is responsible for holding all shared ROR funds in a designated bank account. ROR has full access to and authority over its funds. Financial processes are described in full in the ROR Memorandum of Agreement.

Business model

There are no fees to access and use ROR. ROR data is freely and openly available without any restrictions under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain dedication. ROR code is openly available on GitHub under a MIT License.

ROR’s three governing organizations share collective responsibility for operating ROR and committing in-kind support to cover ROR’s core personnel and operating expenses, per the terms of their Memorandum of Agreement.

Additional investments from community supporters help offset operating costs and support time-limited projects.

In line with ROR’s commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), ROR only uses time-limited funds for time-limited projects, and any potential revenue-generation models developed in the future would be based on services, not data.

During its startup years (2019-2022) ROR operated on a mixed funding model that included:

• In-kind support from the ROR governing organizations
• Contributions from supporting organizations
• Grants (Institute for Museum and Library Services and the National Science Foundation)

Team

Many talented individuals have given their expertise to ROR as part of the Core Team, the Operating Team, or as Alumni and Affiliates. If there are any current openings on the ROR team, they will be available on our jobs page.

Impact

More and more organizations, systems, and researchers are using ROR every day, and we use both qualitative and quantitative measures to assess ROR’s impact. If you’re interested in who’d using ROR and how, you can see our list of ROR integrations and read case studies with ROR adopters. We also track ROR’s impact through the growth of ROR IDs in Crossref and DataCite DOI metadata as well as in ORCID records, maintain a bibliography of published research that mentions ROR, and offer a public dashboard of ROR’s API usage that can give insights into the how and how much people are using the ROR API.

History

ROR is the culmination of several years of extensive community collaborations to develop a shared vision for a registry of organization identifiers. Planning for what would become ROR began in 2016, and ROR launched a “minimum viable registry” in January 2019. Since then, ROR has matured and expanded to become a widely-used persistent identifier for organization disambiguation.

Logos

To obtain official versions of the ROR logo, please first visit our display guidelines page and read the recommendations there. Links to official versions of the ROR logo are available from the display guidelines.

Contact us

• General questions: info@ror.org
• Technical questions: support@ror.org
• Metadata and curation questions: registry@ror.org
• Community and outreach questions: community@ror.org

You can also book a Zoom meeting with Technical Community Manager Amanda French.