The entire ROR registry dataset is freely available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7926988. Each version of the data dump consists of a .zip file with a complete version of the ROR registry in JSON and (as of March 2023 an additional version in CSV. The JSON file includes all fields and sub-fields of every ROR record, whereas the CSV file omits and combines some sub-fields to better suit the CSV format.

All ROR IDs and metadata in the data dump are provided under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Releases

When new releases of the ROR registry are issued, typically at least once a month, the ROR REST API is updated automatically and a new data dump version is uploaded to Zenodo. You can use the Zenodo API to download these data dumps as per the instructions below.

ROR datasets prior to Sep 2021 are available from Figshare. See also the Zenodo ROR Data Community.

See Updates to ROR records for more information on the curation process by which the ROR registry is updated.

Record status

As of December 1, 2022, the data dump contains all records with all statuses (active, inactive, withdrawn), while the API defaults to returning records with a status of active. Prior to 1 Dec 2022, all records had a status of active. Beginning with data dump https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7387951, inactive and withdrawn records are also included. See the 2022-12-01 changelog post for details about this change.

Records with a status of "inactive" or "withdrawn" may have one or more successor organizations listed in their relationships. Successor relationships indicate that another organization continues the work of an organization that has become inactive or has been withdrawn. Depending on your use case, you may wish to update references to inactive ROR records in your system(s) to the corresponding Successor organization(s).

See ROR data structure for more information about status and relationships.

"relationships":[
  {
    "label":"Viavi Solutions (United States)",
    "type":"Successor",
    "id":"https://ror.org/059a9e323"
  }
]

Version naming

Current

Beginning with its Mar 2022 release, ROR is curated independently from GRID. Semantic versioning beginning with v1.0 has been added to reflect this departure from GRID, but the data structure has not changed.

From Mar 2022 onward, data releases are versioned as follows:

Minor versions (ex 1.1, 1.2, 1.3): Contain changes to data, such as a new records and updates to existing records. No changes to the data model/structure.
Patch versions (ex 1.0.1): Used infrequently to correct errors in a release. No changes to the data model/structure.
Major versions (ex 1.x, 2.x, 3.x): Contains changes to data model/structure, as well as the data itself. Major versions will be released with significant advance notice.

For convenience, the date is also include in the release file name, ex: v1.0-2022-03-15-ror-data.zip.

Past

From Apr 2019 to Sep 2021, changes to ROR data happened in collaboration with GRID. After each GRID release, ROR assigned new IDs to each new organization in GRID and published a new ROR release that corresponded to the most recent GRID release. Releases were named with with a date, ex 2021-09-23-ror-data.zip.

GRID announced the sunset of its public data offering in July 2022 and published its final data release in Sept 2021. ROR published a corresponding data release (2021-09-23-ror-data.zip) in Sept 2021. Both releases contained the same set of organizations, with GRID and ROR IDs assigned to all.

Download ROR data dumps programmatically with the Zenodo API

Get a list of the records in the ror-data community

curl https://zenodo.org/api/records/?communities=ror-data&sort=mostrecent

In the response, the most recent record will be hits.hits[0]. Find the latest file attached to this record by checking the last item in hits.hits[0].files. The file URL is in links.self within the file object.

...
   "hits" : {
      "hits" : [
         {
            "conceptdoi" : "10.5281/zenodo.6347574",
            "conceptrecid" : "6347574",
            "created" : "2022-06-17T15:07:41.543813+00:00",
            "doi" : "10.5281/zenodo.6657125",
            "files" : [
               {
                  "bucket" : "25d4f93f-6854-4dd4-9954-173197e7fad7",
                  "checksum" : "md5:88307ac74fad1c388f4987c00d09f769",
                  "key" : "v1.0-2022-03-17-ror-data.json.zip",
                  "links" : {
                     "self" : "https://zenodo.org/api/files/25d4f93f-6854-4dd4-9954-173197e7fad7/v1.0-2022-03-17-ror-data.json.zip"
                  },
                  "size" : 20378730,
                  "type" : "zip"
               },
               {
                  "bucket" : "25d4f93f-6854-4dd4-9954-173197e7fad7",
                  "checksum" : "md5:045f3edcb72e323a742e88bf81361a26",
                  "key" : "v1.1-2022-06-16-ror-data.zip",
                  "links" : {
                     "self" : "https://zenodo.org/api/files/25d4f93f-6854-4dd4-9954-173197e7fad7/v1.1-2022-06-16-ror-data.zip"
                  },
                  "size" : 20454781,
                  "type" : "zip"
               }
            ]
...

Download the file to a local directory using the link

curl https://zenodo.org/api/files/25d4f93f-6854-4dd4-9954-173197e7fad7/v1.1-2022-06-16-ror-data.zip

For additional information about retrieving files from Zenodo using the API, see https://developers.zenodo.org/#records.