Change, Continuity, and New Positions on the ROR Team

ROR is fortunate to have a small but mighty team that strives every day to make ROR as good as it can be and to support the diverse needs of our global community.

Ever since ROR was established, we’ve continually adjusted our resourcing and staffing to keep up with ROR’s needs and to align ROR activities with the needs and priorities of ROR’s operating organizations. The ROR team has therefore changed and grown over the years since the registry’s initial launch, evolving from an ad hoc project team to a more formal structure with dedicated staff members. This was made possible initially through startup funds from ROR’s operating organizations, contributions from community supporters, and multi-year grants.

As ROR began to move beyond its startup phase, ROR’s three operating organizations recognized the need to have long-term dedicated resourcing, and thus in 2022 they committed to supporting ROR’s core expenses on an ongoing basis. A shared staffing model is a critical part of this agreement, ensuring that ROR has dedicated personnel to carry out essential activities. Each organization essentially “contributes” one or more staff members to ROR on a dedicated basis, and we balance these contributions across our three organizations.

Staff arrivals and departures are an inevitable development in any team or organization, and ROR is no exception in this regard. Since the beginning of 2024, the ROR team has been experiencing a few changes – but at the same time, many things have stayed the same. We wanted to take this opportunity to update the community on how the team has been evolving.

In January of this year, long-time ROR Director Maria Gould left her position at California Digital Library to assume a new role as Director of Product at DataCite. With DataCite being one of ROR’s operating organizations, and ROR a core piece of DataCite’s overall strategic vision, it was natural for Maria to continue as Director of ROR, although in a slightly more limited capacity in order to fulfill the responsibilities of her new role.

As of this month, long-time Metadata Curation Lead Adam Buttrick has left his position at Crossref to fill the vacancy at CDL left by Maria. The CDL position is a senior-level Product Manager role focused on leading a portfolio of persistent identifier services, of which ROR is a key element. Like Maria’s time previously, Adam’s time will be split across ROR and other PID services and activities. With ROR’s metadata being a core product offering for CDL, Adam will continue to support metadata curation activities while also driving further product development work on ROR’s overall services and infrastructure.

Adam’s departure from Crossref means that there is a new vacancy to fill! ROR’s curation activities continue apace, receiving approximately 700 requests every month to add or update registry records and publishing new registry releases approximately every 2-4 weeks. Curation activities are also heavily focused on the incorporation of the Funder Registry into ROR, with ongoing reconciliation work to support all those who have switched - or are planning to switch - to using ROR for funding organization identification. As the scope of curation activities and product development has grown with wider adoption of ROR, we need to ensure we have adequate resourcing and staffing to keep up with these developments. We are now hiring a new ROR team member - Metadata Manager - at Crossref to coordinate ROR metadata curation as well as support related metadata initiatives at Crossref. Read the position announcement and please consider applying yourself or spreading the word to your networks!

All of these developments reflect how ROR continues to stabilize and mature, and they underscore the importance of continuing to grow the team to support ongoing needs as ROR evolves. At the same time, we fully intend to keep our operations small and nimble in order to stay focused on key objectives and remain flexible enough to adapt to future changes.

Photo by Jansen Yang on Unsplash