ROR basics

What is ROR?

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) (pronounced "roar") is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations. ROR makes it easy for anyone or any system to disambiguate research organization affiliations and connect research organizations to researchers and research outputs.

The ROR registry includes identifiers and metadata for more than 100,000 organizations: companies, universities, labs, research centers, nonprofits, and government organizations -- any organization involved in scholarly research. For more information, see ROR FAQs.

ROR is the first and only organization identifier that is openly available (CC0 data available via an open REST API and public data dump), specifically focused on identifying affiliations in scholarly metadata, developed as a community initiative to meet community use cases, and designed to be integrated into open scholarly infrastructure. It is the default organization identifier supported in Crossref DOI metadata, DataCite DOI metadata, and ORCID.

Tools and services

In addition to the registry, ROR provides a set of open tools for interacting with ROR data and integrating ROR IDs. These include:

How is ROR used?

ROR can be used in any system where affiliation data is collected or consumed. ROR is therefore useful for any stakeholders who need to track research by institution, including publishers, repositories, funders, and research administrators. See a list of current integrations.

Governance

ROR is operated as a collaborative initiative by California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite, in consultation with a broad network of community advisors. Read more about ROR's governance model.

Roadmap

The ROR roadmap is available on Github.

ROR glossary


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