Flashback to one year ago, December 2018: The ROR project team was putting the final pieces in place to launch the ROR MVR (minimum viable registry) in January. The ROR ID format was under discussion. A website was under construction. The purchase of the ror.org domain was being negotiated. We were getting ready to ROAR! But we weren’t sure at that time who else would be listening, and who might be ready to roar alongside us.
As we announced previously, ROR launched a fundraising campaign in October to ensure the registry’s long-term sustainability. We are grateful for the community supporters who have already contributed to this campaign. The first round of supporters was [announced a couple of weeks ago] (https://ror.org/blog/2019-11-13-ror-fundraising-update/). We are excited in this post to acknowledge the following additional contributors: American Physical Society American Psychological Association Association for Computing Machinery These new contributions supplement those previously received from:
ROR launched in January 2019 with records for nearly 100,000 research organizations, all with unique IDs and associated metadata. ROR data is useful for a variety of reasons and for a variety of users, including both humans and machines. It is essential for ROR to have robust mechanisms for searching, retrieving, and filtering. Since launching the registry, we have been making improvements to the codebase to strengthen and enhance these mechanisms.
ROR is thrilled to announce that we are welcoming new members to the ROR Steering Group. The group now consists of the following members: Matt Buys, DataCite John Chodacki, California Digital Library Daniel Hook, Digital Science Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information Ritsuko Nakajima, Japan Science and Technology Agency Ed Pentz, Crossref Judy Ruttenberg, Association of Research Libraries Ina Smith, Academy of Science of South Africa Approximately one year ago, a ROR project team formed as the outcome of the prior OrgID initiative to initiate a startup effort to develop the first iteration of the ROR registry.
ROR launched a fundraising campaign in October to call on community stakeholders to pitch in toward supporting ROR’s long-term sustainability. While the overall goal of this campaign is to raise $175,000 from community supporters over the next two years, we set an initial target of $75,000 by the end of 2019. In our fourth full week of the campaign, we are excited to announce that we have so far raised $13,500 in contributions from six different supporting organizations.
ROR is the Research Organization Registry, a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. ROR emerged to fill a crucial gap in the scholarly communication landscape: while we already had an open network of identifiers for research outputs (DOIs for publications and data) and research contributors (ORCID IDs), open infrastructure for research organizations was a missing piece. ROR is a robust and stable registry of identifiers for close to 100K organizations (and counting!
How many datasets have been published in Dryad from researchers at the University of California? This question is surprisingly complicated. A short answer might be, we don’t know! A better answer could be, coming soon - stay tuned! And a more complete and detailed answer might go something like this: It’s not easy to determine how many datasets in Dryad are affiliated with the University of California - or any other institution, for that matter.
ROR is an open registry for every research organization in the world, aiming to solve the problem of identifying which organizations are affiliated with which research outputs. When the ROR MVR (minimum viable registry) launched in January, the registry included records for 91,000+ organizations, each with a unique ROR ID. Since getting the MVR up and running, ROR development updates have been focused on enhancing the technical implementation of the registry.
In the days following the ROR community meeting in Dublin, we had a chance to spread the word about ROR in presentations at PIDapalooza, the annual festival for persistent identifiers. Members of the ROR project team led an interactive session that included an affiliation-matching game to demonstrate the messiness of identifying and aligning metadata about an institution, and discuss how ROR IDs can address these challenges. The session culminated with participants looking up the ROR IDs for their own institutions and drawing them on their very own lion masks, reflecting the twin themes of uniqueness and community that are so central to ROR’s aims.
What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right! Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin. We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community.