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.
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!
Earlier this year, the Org ID Working Group wrapped up their work. There was a lot of talk about governance, with options discussed for creating an entirely new independent organization; and/or having a looser group of stakeholders. After several months of discussion following the January stakeholder meeting in Girona, Spain, there was still no easy answer to the governance question. It’s especially tough when getting down to details like timelines, hosting, staffing, and of course, funding. Our organizations each had to question whether we are truly capable of taking a leading role and really commit, having the will and agility to implement the outcomes of the Working Group.