ROR supports parent-child organizational hierarchies as well as other types of relationships between organizations. This blog post explains how organizational hierarchies and relationships are expressed in ROR metadata, offers statistics on hierarchies and relationships in ROR, summarizes ROR's curation practices for hierarchies and relationships, and gives examples of real-life use cases of ROR hierarchies and relationships.
The ROR registry includes unique IDs and associated metadata records for 100,000+ research organizations. Each one of these organizations has at least one name. Some of them have multiple names (one even has 15)! Organization names in ROR appear in 120 different languages and counting.
Some of the most frequent questions ROR receives are about what it means when an organization is in ROR, and how organizations end up in the registry in the first place. Many of you are understandably curious about how ROR records are added and updated. So, we thought this would be a good time to talk about how the registry is being maintained and how this process evolving.
The Research Organization Registry is a cross-organizational and multi-stakeholder initiative. ROR is run by a small group of steering organizations in collaboration with a broad network of community advisors and supporters.
Version 4.3 of the DataCite Metadata Schema released during August, 2019 included (among other things), the capability to provide persistent identifiers for affiliated organizations in the metadata (Dasler and deSmaele, Identify your affiliation with Metadata Schema 4.3, 2019). This capability builds on the work and enthusiasm generated by the ROR Community that has championed the concept of open organization identifiers for several years (Gould, A Reflection on ROR’s First Year, 2019). This is a critical step towards consistent integration of organizations into the growing web of connections across the scholarly communications landscape and research communities in all disciplines.