Unmute to ROAR! ROR's third annual (and first virtual) community meeting

ROR turned three last week and marked the occasion just like anyone else celebrating a birthday during the pandemic: with a virtual party! More than eighty attendees from around the world came together for the now third annual ROR community meeting, held this year on Zoom across two sessions to reach ROR’s global community in as many timezones as possible.

At the meeting, we reflected on milestones and highlights from the past year and discussed the goals, opportunities, and challenges that lie ahead. The two main areas of focus for ROR in 2021 are adoption and curation.

Integrating ROR IDs across our scholarly infrastructure is crucial for realizing the power and potential of ROR’s open registry of identifiers for research organizations. Those interested in adopting ROR and/or working with ROR data need support and guidance. Please get in touch with ROR if you are working on any integrations or have any suggestions or feedback about how to support wider adoption of ROR, or if you are interested in joining a working group for ROR adopters or API users.

For those integrating ROR, guidelines for how (or even if) to display ROR IDs are also needed. We have developed draft guidance on best practices that is available for community feedback through 28 February. Review the draft guidelines.

The ability to maintain the data in ROR and curate it over time is also critical. ROR needs to become independent from GRID, which provided the seed data for the registry, and implement its own infrastructure and workflows for adding and updating records. ROR is developing community-based processes and policies for reviewing changes. Please get in touch with ROR if this is something you are interested in helping with.

While we wished we could have seen everyone in person for the 2021 annual meeting, the virtual format made it possible to bring even more people together who would not have ordinarily been able to travel to attend the meeting in person. Fortunately, we even figured out a way to ROAR together on Zoom!

Thank you for being part of the ROR Community—whether you’ve been part of the journey since the very beginning or are just now joining the pride. We’re happy you’re here.