ROR Turns Four: Highlights from the 2023 Annual Community Meeting

Four years ago, ROR was first introduced to the world at an open community meeting the day before PIDapalooza.

Since then, we have continued to celebrate ROR’s anniversary every year with a big public event to bring together the broad network of ROR users and supporters and reinforce ROR’s commitment to developing open, sustainable, community-driven infrastructure. (In previous blog posts, we’ve shared recaps of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 meetings.)

For the 2023 annual meeting, we celebrated four years of ROR with four exciting virtual sessions attended by hundreds of participants from around the world.

Session 1: ROR Community Update

In the first sesssion - a general community update - the ROR team reviewed key highlights from the past year and discussed plans for the coming year. We also shared ways for community members to get more involved in ROR activities (if they are not already participating).

Session 2: Open Drop-In Hour

In the second session, we held an open drop-in session (not recorded) to meet informally with anyone interested in chatting about ROR. This is a model for similar sessions we’d like to hold throughout the year, especially to be able to reach people located in different timezones or who are not always able to attend the bimonthly ROR community calls. Stay tuned for announcements about future drop-in times!

Session 3: Introduction to the ROR API

This year’s meeting also featured the introduction of a new session focused on how to work with the ROR API. Technical Community Manager Amanda French delivered an engaging tutorial on how to use the ROR API and get up and running with basic queries. If you weren’t able to attend the session, watch the recording and check out the workshop materials!

Session 4: Strategies for Matching Affiliation Strings to ROR IDs

The last session, “Strategies for Matching Affiliation Strings to ROR IDs,” featured a panel of users (OpenAlex, Allen Institute for AI, DOE/OSTI, and Crossref) sharing their work to develop automated approaches to reconciling affiliation data with ROR. We are eager to bring people together to develop collaborative solutions to shared problems, and the panel was a great example of putting this into practice.

Four more years - and then some more!

Four years is a huge milestone for ROR! At this stage in our journey, we are proud and excited that ROR’s open data and API are being used around the world and in more than 50 known integrations, that registry records are being actively and regularly maintained through a transparent community-based process, that ROR is supported in Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID and being recommended in national PID strategies (most recently, in Australia), that ROR’s three governing organizations are committed to ROR’s long-term sustainability, that ROR has been selected by SCOSS, and that we are part of a growing movement of initiatives to develop and follow best practices for community-led open infrastructure.

We could not have reached this milestone without your support - whether you have been part of ROR since the very beginning, or whether you are a newer member of the pride. Thank you! Here’s to ROR-ing together for the next four years and then some more!