Advancing Open PID Infrastructure at Scale: A New Face and Exciting Projects for the ROR Technical Team

We are thrilled to introduce the newest member of the ROR pride: Joseph Rhoads joined the ROR team in September as our new Technical Lead.

Joseph follows in the footsteps (pawprints?) of long-time Technical Lead Liz Krznarich, who supported ROR’s foundational technical development over the past several years to strengthen and scale the registry’s infrastructure and implement key initiatives such as our independent curation workflow and version 2 of the ROR schema and API. Earlier this year, Liz embarked on a new endeavor in the world of geology and natural history to be a software developer for the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (ROR ID https://ror.org/02kj3rm24) in her home state. We are immensely grateful for Liz’s many contributions to ROR over the years, and for setting ROR up for sustained technical stability and success into the future.

Originally from the US but currently based in Valencia, Spain, Joseph joins ROR from DataCite, where since 2021 he has been supporting software engineering various DataCite technical projects and services, including DataCite Commons. Prior to joining DataCite, Joseph worked at Brown University Library, where he gained extensive experience in repository management and institutional research monitoring, both of which will be valuable perspectives to bring to ROR. Joseph will continue to be based at DataCite as he assumes this new role, according to the shared resourcing and governance model that ROR’s three operating organizations have adopted.

Joseph says, “I’m excited to dig in to the work of supporting this important open infrastructure. This means focusing my energy on scaling our core systems, ensuring data integrity for the registry, and maximizing interoperability to keep ROR at the heart of global scholarly communication.”

As we invite our community to join us in welcoming Joseph to the team, we also want to take this opportunity to highlight a few key technical projects that are underway this year and remind everyone what to look out for and how to get more involved.

Schema version changes

As we’ve shared in previous posts and community calls, ROR schema version 2 is now the default as of July 31 of this year, and we will officially deprecate schema version 1 in December 2025. If you have questions about what this means for you and/or how to update your integrations as a result of these changes, check out our documentation and get in touch with any questions via our technical forum or support@ror.org.

Implementation of API client IDs

In order to support and scale growing usage of the ROR API while also ensuring it can continue to remain open and free for everyone and anyone to use, we will be implementing new rate limits in early 2026 and enabling a client identification workflow for users to obtain higher rates. Learn more about what this means for you, and how to get started by obtaining a client ID.

Updates to affiliation matching

Affiliation matching is the number-one use of the ROR API, and we’ve been making ongoing tweaks over the years to refine our matching API to support various use cases as more and more systems integrate with ROR. Following development of a new matching strategy at Crossref, we are now working to adapt this for ROR to make our affiliation matching service even more useful and performant.

Join us

These projects and other technical activities have all been - and continue to be - shaped by active community input and collaboration. We take our position as community-driven open infrastructure very seriously, and that means working directly with users and our wider network of stakeholders to inform our development work, align our services to address concrete user needs, and deliver value at scale for our global community.

If you haven’t already gotten involved in our work, there are many ways to do so, including by joining our bimonthly community calls, by signing up for the ROR Technical Forum and/or ROR Community Forum, by suggesting registry additions and updates, and by submitting bug reports and feature requests.

Welcome, Joseph, and thanks to everyone for participating in this journey together!