One of the highlights of 2024 for the ROR team and the ROR community was the release of version 2 of the ROR API and schema in April. Before that milestone, we spent many months working together to develop an API and schema versioning policy: that policy states that "Plans to sunset a previous version will be announced at least 1 year prior to the planned sunset date." We've been reminding the ROR community ever since the launch of v2 of the ROR API and schema that version 2 is the recommended, stable version and that v1 of the ROR API would be deprecated in 2025. Today, we're sharing further details and more precise dates for the deprecation of version 1 of ROR so that ROR users have all the lead time they need to make any necessary changes.

Today we are announcing a non-breaking change to the ROR schema that adds geographic location. The current ROR data structure was revised in April of 2024 and formalized into schema v2.0 as a JSON schema document. In schema v2.0, significant changes were made to fields that contained geographic information, including removing fields related to administrative subdivisions corresponding to units such as Canadian provinces, Japanese prefectures, and US states.

After over a year planning and many rounds of community input, we are thrilled to release ROR's first major schema and API update (version 2.0)! Per ROR's versioning policy, v1 will continue to remain available in the API and data dump through at least April 2025, and will likely be available for 6-12 months beyond that date.

ROR API usage has increased dramatically over the past 3 years, from ~1 million requests per month to over 17 million. We made some tweaks along the way to keep it up and running, but we knew that a more significant overhaul was needed to put ROR in a good position to handle further API traffic increases. This is why API infrastructure updates and scaling were included as a major project on our 2023 Roadmap.

By popular demand, starting with today's data release (v1.21), the data dump includes a CSV version of the ROR data file in addition to the canonical JSON file.

After a 6-month period of planning, community input and implementation, we've released changes to the API, UI and data dump in order to support cases where an organization has ceased to operate, merged with another organization, was added to ROR in error. Read the rest of this post for complete details!

Based on user feedback, we've released a set of tweaks to ROR's affiliation matching service focused on improving precision and reducing false positive results. The updated affiliation matching service is now available in production, at the existing affiliation matching endpoint https://api.ror.org/organziations?affiliation=. While the search behavior has changed slightly, request and response format remains remains unchanged. Many thanks to ROR integrators who helped to beta test these improvements! Read the rest of this post for details about the changes.