Pre-ROR
Between 2016 and 2018, a group of 17 organizations with a shared purpose invested their time and energy into what was then known as the “Org ID” initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry that would benefit all of our communities.
2016
In 2016, a series of collaborative workshops took place at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in San Antonio, Texas, the FORCE11 conference in Portland, Oregon, and at PIDapalooza in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Findings from these workshops were summarized in three documents, which were made openly available to the community for public comment:
- Organization Identifier Project: A Way Forward
- Organization Identifier Provider Landscape
- Technical Considerations for an Organization Identifier Registry.
2017
A Working Group worked throughout 2017 and voted to approve a core set of governance recommendations and product principles, drawing from conversations with community stakeholders.
A Request for Information sought expressions of interest from organizations to be involved in implementing and running an organization identifier registry.
2018
Following an enthusiastic response to the RFI, there was a stakeholder meeting in Girona, Spain, in January 2018, at which ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref were tasked with drafting a proposal that met the Working Group’s requirements.
In the discussions and planning process that followed the Girona meeting, it became clear that building a pilot registry would be a practical place to start, with governance and other community layers ultimately built around it.
A new steering group consisting of California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science stepped up to implement the pilot, with a donation of seed data from Digital Science’s GRID database. The pilot was called the Research Organization Registry, and thus ROR was born!
Launch of ROR
The first iteration of the registry, known as the Minimum Viable Registry (MVR) was launched in January 2019 at an open community meeting at PIDapalooza in Dublin, Ireland.
The MVR and first registry release included ROR IDs and metadata for 91,625 organizations and was built from seed data from GRID. The MVR also included mechanisms for accessing and querying ROR data via a search interface, REST API, and data dump.
Startup phase
2019
ROR’s early years following its launch in early 2019 were focused on developing the registry’s infrastructure beyond the MVR, raising community awareness and encouraging adoption, establishing a governance structure, and building a foundation for long-term sustainability.
ROR’s Community Advisory Group was established in March 2019 and began to meet in bimonthly online Community Calls.
Dryad became the first ROR adopter in July 2019.
DataCite began supporting ROR IDs in its DOI metadata schema in August 2019.
ROR kicked off a community fundraising campaign in October 2019 that has raised funds from supporters around the world.
ROR’s inaugural Steering Group was established in November 2019.
2020
California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite signed the first memorandum of agreement for shared responsibility and governance of ROR in May 2020.
In 2020, ROR was awarded grants from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to implement a community-based curation model and to expand adoption of ROR IDs in research infrastructure.
ROR became one of the first adopters of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure in December 2020.
Read about ROR’s 2020 Annual Report.
2021
In July 2021, GRID announced plans to sunset its public data and officially pass the torch to ROR.
Crossref announced support for ROR IDs in its DOI metadata schema in July 2021.
GRID published its final public dataset in September 2021.
ORCID announced its integration with ROR in October 2021.
2022
ROR published its first independent registry update in March 2022.
ROR formalized its sustainability model in September 2022.
ROR was selected by SCOSS as essential open scholarly infrastructure in November 2022.
Read ROR’s 2022 Year in Review.
Expansion phase
2023
In early 2023, ROR opened its online Annual Community Meetings and bimonthly Community Calls to public registration, began publishing slides from the calls, and began releasing videos of the calls on YouTube.
Crossref and ROR announced that the Open Funder Registry would be merged into ROR in September 2023.
ROR launched the beta version of version 2 of its API and schema in September 2023.
Read ROR’s 2023 Year in Review.
2024
ROR released version 2 of its API and schema in April 2024.
New ROR integrations were announced by Springer Nature, American Physical Society, DSpace 8.0 and DSpace-CRIS, Clarivate™ Web of Science, and many more.
ROR released version 2.1 of its schema in December 2024.
In the course of the year, ROR processed over 8,000 requests for changes or additions to the registry (a 44% increase in request volume over 2023) and added over 4,000 new records, bringing the total number of records in ROR to over 111,000.
Read ROR’s 2024 Year in Review.