ROR's Fifth Anniversary: Highlights from the 2024 Annual Community Meeting

Every year since 2019, we’ve celebrated ROR’s anniversary at the same time we hold our annual community meeting, updating everyone on what ROR has accomplished in the last year and expressing our gratitude for the help of the ROR community. This year, the 2024 annual meeting featured five online events: a general update and fifth anniversary celebration, a community showcase, a panel on funding metadata, and two informal (unrecorded) drop-in sessions.

We had over 300 unique registrants for our three recorded sessions, making this the most popular ROR annual community meeting ever! It was a true delight to see so many ROR users and supporters come together and to meet some people who are new to ROR. If you missed the meeting, here are the highlights.

ROR Annual Meeting and Fifth Anniversary Celebration

The 2024 edition of the main ROR annual meeting was a special one! We took the opportunity to reflect on the last five years, remembering where we started and how we got here. We heard about where we’ve been and where we’re going in terms of our community of adopters, our curation activities, and our tech. Most importantly, we acknowledged ROR community contributors, without whom we’d never have come this far, and we did some brainstorming about what’s next.

Selected highlights

• A look back at memories of ROR from 2016-2019, including a white paper on the concept of an organization identifier registry, a working group report, and pictures from in-person events
• Stats of ROR adoption include a staggering 1.48 million DOIs registered with DataCite that include ROR IDs to identify creators or contributors
• The number of requests to add new records to ROR has surged from 50 per month in January 2022 to more than 700 per month in January 2024
• Key technical accomplishments in 2023 include schema v2 development, implementation, and beta test; anticipated for 2024 is the public launch of v2 and a redesigned affiliation matching service
• ROR Community members are in strong alignment that we are on the right track and should keep going, specifically focusing on continuing our work on publisher adoption and the Crossref Open Funder Registry transition in 2024

Community Showcase

The Community Showcase featured presentations on how ROR is used in some key global scholarly systems and workflows, including at OpenAlex, 4Science / DSpace-CRIS, ORCID, Springer Nature, US Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), and the ROR Implementation Task Group of the NIH’s Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI).

Selected highlights

• A live demo of OpenAlex’s web interface, whose institutional data relies on ROR
• ROR will be on the roadmap for DSpace 8.0
• ROR IDs now account for half of new affiliations created in ORCID; over 1.2 million ORCID records have a ROR ID and more than 50,000 unique ROR IDs are represented in ORCID
• Springer Nature currently has over 1.1 million ROR IDs in its metadata and its next steps are to add ROR IDs to already published content, provide ROR IDs to Crossref during metadata deposit, and evaluate other use cases for ROR
• OSTI will begin including ROR IDs in its metadata once they deploy their new internal authority as part of E-Link 2.0, their new research submission tool
• Of the 7 repository systems participating in NIH’s GREI initiative, 5 have already adopted ROR for organizational affiliations and 3 have adopted ROR for funder associations

Why We All Need Good Funding Metadata

The session Why We All Need Good Funding Metadata addressed the issue that funding information is an increasingly important piece of metadata for many stakeholders, yet standardizing and using identifiers for funders remains a challenge. With ROR set to become the standard persistent identifier for funders, we convened a panel for ROR’s annual community meeting to hear diverse perspectives about how funding metadata is used and what might make it better. We heard from funders, publishers, metadata specialists, and more, including CHORUS, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Dryad, Crossref, and Stratos for Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s.

Selected highlights

All panelists were asked “If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you’d do to improve funding metadata?” The answers:

• “Make extracting PIDs and their associated metadata from articles, datasets and software simple, open and affordable for all!”
• “All organisations and systems consistently using standard PIDs for people, organisations, grants, projects, data and publications throughout the funding, research and publication processes”
• “Systems/tools can accurately extract & identify funders from authors’ acknowledgements and match to funder IDs at the point of submission”
• “All funder data available through APIs”

Let’s ROR some more in 2024!

ROR has come a long way in the last five years, and ROR is going even farther in the next five. Heartfelt gratitude is due to everyone in the community who has helped to make ROR a reality, including the ROR Operations Team; the ROR Curation Advisors; the ROR Steering Group; ROR Sustaining Supporters; ROR adopters and integrators; members of the ROR technical forum and ROR Slack; subscribers to the ROR quarterly newsletter; our colleagues at Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library; all the alumni and affiliates who helped build ROR; everyone who presents at a ROR community call and participates in our case studies; all those who attend ROR events; and the many, many people who ask for a change or addition to ROR records. We wouldn’t be here without your engagement and support!

Hope to see you all throughout 2024 and at the next annual meeting in 2025.