Highlights from the 2026 ROR Annual Community Meeting

In the ROR Annual Community Meeting in February, we celebrated seven years of ROR and the ROR community that makes it all possible in three terrific online sessions featuring ROR team members and ROR enthusiasts from all over the world. If you missed any of the sessions, read the highlights and access slides and recordings below, and be sure set yourself a reminder to attend live next year in early 2027!

Reflections on where ROR is now

The annual ROR Community Update is always an opportunity for reflection on how far we’ve come, but in this seventh edition of the meeting we also took the opportunity to reflect on what has remained the same. In the last seven years, ROR has changed a lot in terms of how we’re used, how we operate, and what we offer, but we’ve remained true to our guiding vision and values. And of course, one thing that will never change is our perpetual gratitude to all of you around the world who support ROR in so many different ways: from submitting registry updates to integrating ROR in your systems and from telling colleagues and friends about ROR to investing in our sustainability.

Highlights from the community update:

• Key ROR system integrations in 2025 include Symplectic, RAID, DOCID, RDA, and OJS 3.5.
• Crossref also added support for ROR IDs as funder identifiers, and entities such as Fonds de recherche du Québec and the Worldwide Protein Data Bank registered thousands of new Crossref records with ROR IDs.
• The number of Crossref records with ROR IDs more than tripled in 2025, and the rate of ROR use in DataCite and ORCID records also remains very high.
• In 2025, ROR’s curators processed over 12,200 user-submitted curation requests, adding over 8,500 new relationships and expanding domain metadata.
• ROR curators focused on streamlining workflows and increasing global coverage in 2025; notable regional growth in ROR includes East Asian research organizations.
• ROR’s technical team deprecated v1 of the ROR schema and API in 2025, improved the performance and stability of the ROR API, and launched a new “single search” name-to-ROR-ID matching strategy.
• Technical goals for 2026 include improving curation workflows, enhancing the web search experience, upgrading core technologies, and making single search the default affiliation matching strategy.
• The timeline for requiring a client ID in order to receive the current ROR API rate limits has been extended to Q3 of 2026.

ROR, funders, and open funding metadata

One of those aforementioned changes in the last seven years is that ROR is now often used as an identifier for organizations that fund research as well as for organizations that perform research. The annual meeting session How ROR Can Help Research Funders offered several perspectives on ROR’s usefulness in helping funders track the research that has resulted from their support.

Highlights from the funder session:

• Hans de Jonge, Head of Open Science Policies, NWO, made a compelling case for the general need for open funding metadata in scholarly publishing. Shortly after the annual meeting, Hans also wrote a blog post for us explaining how and why NWO has integrated ROR into its open API.

• Ana Van Gulick, Head of Customer Engagement for Government, Funders & Nonprofits, Digital Science and (in absentia) Ishwar Chandramouliswaran, Lead Program Director, Office of Data Science Strategy, NIH, both of the GREI initiative, explained how and why the seven participating generalist repositories implemented ROR and announced some exciting forthcoming ROR-powered metrics and metadata dashboards.

• Ami Gala, Sales Director, Americas, Altum, gave a detailed overview of how and why the popular Proposal Central grants management system uses ROR.

ROR and National Research Strategies in the Asia-Pacific Region

As we mentioned in the Community Update, ROR worked hard in 2025 to make ROR a truly global registry: of the 8,000+ organization records we added to ROR last year, nearly 20% represent organizations located in East Asia. The annual meeting session The Role of ROR in National Research Strategies therefore featured speakers from Japan and Korea as well as from Australia and was held at an APAC-friendly time.

Highlights from the session on national research strategies:

• Kazuhiro Hayashi, Principal Senior Fellow, NISTEP, gave an overview of local PIDs in Japan, explained recent collaborative work to link the NISTEP Dictionary and ROR, and pointed to ROR as an example of an important PID in the proposal for the next STI Basic Plan of the Science Council of Japan.

• Clare Nulley-Valdes, Assistant Director Evaluation and Impact Policy, Australian Research Council, spoke on Australia’s National PID Strategy and ARC’s PID Action Plan and reported that ARC has incorporated ROR IDs into its internal systems and will begin requiring researchers to use ROR in funding acknowledgements.

• Jungwoo Lee, Senior Researcher, KISTI, discussed the challenges of building and maintaining an in-house organization registry, reported on a recent ROR / KISTI collaboration to improve coverage of Korean organizations in ROR, and explained how KISTI uses ROR and Web of Science to track Korean research.

Looking ahead

Change is one of the few constants in life, but what won’t change is that ROR will always be community-led and will always be committed to improving our content and services based on your feedback. We’ve got plenty to do in the months and years ahead, as you can see from our roadmap, but we’re still always happy to hear from you about what else you’d like to see us do and how we can better support your needs for open, high-quality, interoperable organization information. Join us in 2026 at our bi-monthly Community Calls and other events and write us at support@ror.org with questions and suggestions.