ROR's Year in Review: 2022

2022 has been a momentous year for ROR! We experienced significant growth, reached critical milestones, and established a foundation for long-term sustainability. As the year comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to reflect on our activities and give thanks to our community for supporting us along the way.

2022 highlights

Activities and milestones we’re proud of in 2022 include:

• Expanding the ROR core team (we hired curation lead Adam Buttrick and technical community manager Amanda French, and shifted Liz Krznarich to technical lead).

• Updating the registry independently and implementing an end-to-end community-based curation process: we launched ROR’s independent curation and data release process and began publishing registry updates on a regular basis in response to community feedback. We also onboarded new curators to ROR’s curation advisory board, expanding beyond the original pilot cohort. 

• Seeing ROR adoption grow: new integrations were launched by organizations including Open Science Framework, Beilstein Institut, Science Data Bank, FAIRsharing, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Crossref also launched support for ROR IDs in its schema and APIs.

• Accelerating technical development work according to a new product development process.

• Improving ways to search and query registry data: we implemented “advanced search” functionality in the ROR API and improvements to the ROR API affiliation matching function, and fixed some search-related bugs. We also implemented new handling to support organization status changes.

• Planning for future changes to the ROR schema/API: we finalized a plan for schema and API versioning based on community input, and drafted a proposal for the first set of changes to come in late 2023.

• Updating ROR’s website and search interface to meet optimize accessibility and improve functionality, including adding more details to the ROR record display.

• Growing the ROR Steering Group by welcoming three new members (Lautaro Matas from LA Referencia, Kathleen Shearer from COAR, and Chris Shillum from ORCID). 

• Formalizing a revised resourcing model for ROR based on long-term support from our three operating organizations.

• Being recognized by SCOSS as essential open infrastructure.

2022 by the numbers

Another way to understand ROR’s growth in 2022 is looking at our activities in numbers.

• ROR API usage grew to 13+ million requests per month in 2022, up from ~6 million per month at the end of 2021 and ~3 million per month at the end of 2020. 

• We published eighteen registry data releases, which comprise the addition of 2,010 new organization records and the application of 11,135 updates to 10,073 existing records (about 10% of the total registry).

• The ROR data dump had approximately 2,900 unique downloads

• Community participation remained strong, with 50+ attendees at ROR’s bi-monthly community advisory meetings, 3,000+ email newsletter recipients, and 2,100+ Twitter followers. 

• ROR team members presented at 16 conferences and community events. 

Looking ahead

We’re proud of what we accomplished in 2022, and we’re looking forward to another productive year. In 2023, we’ll be focusing on accelerating ROR integrations, scaling our technical infrastructure, and improving coverage and quality of the ROR dataset.

As always, in all of this work, we will continue to depend on community input and involvement to make sure we are reflecting your needs and use cases. Thank you for your continued engagement and support!