ROR for Publishers

What is ROR?

ROR (Research Organization Registry) is a community-led registry of open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifiers for every research organization in the world. To learn more about ROR's history, scope and governance, visit ror.org/about.

ROR includes identifiers and metadata for more than 100,000 organizations. ROR identifiers are designed to link research organizations to research outputs in scholarly infrastructure. Search the ROR registry at ror.org/search.

How do publishers use ROR?

Academic publishers use ROR to help ensure that author/reviewer/editor affiliation and funding organization information is entered consistently, so that contributions from users affiliated with or funded by a particular organization can be easily identified.

ROR not only helps to streamline internal workflows; as an open identifier, it’s ideal for inclusion in DOI metadata submitted to Crossref.

When affiliations and ROR IDs are included in DOI metadata, the entire scholarly community can leverage that information to automate reporting and gain insight into research outputs at the institutional level.

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Crossref schema now supports ROR!
As of v5.3.0 (released in July 2021), the Crossref metadata schema supports ROR IDs for all types of content that have an affiliation or institution element, such as journal articles, book chapters, preprints, datasets, dissertations, and many more. For more information, see Include ROR IDs in Crossref DOIs and watch the September 2021 webinar Working with ROR as a Crossref Member.

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Important news for publishers currently using GRID!
After 6 years, Digital Science’s GRID has retired its public release, with the final public dataset published 16 Sep 2021. If you're currently using GRID in your system(s), we recommend that you plan to switch to ROR. See GRID/ROR Transition FAQ

How can ROR IDs help?

Administrative operations: Streamline administrative workflows, such as managing institutional APCs, by accurately identifying author affiliations
Metrics/analytics: Gain more accurate insight into which institutions are represented by your authors, reviewers, editors, etc
Enabling the scholarly community: Allow the entire scholarly community to gain insight into research outputs at the institutional level by exposing affiliation information in DOI metadata submitted to Crossref or DataCite.

ROR integration points for publishers

Submission/review

Match ROR IDs to author, reviewer and editor affiliations AND to funder organizations in your submission/review systems:

For new submissions/registrations: Add typeahead fields that are populated using ROR data to your manuscript submission/user registration system forms. See Create ROR-powered typeaheads in forms.
For existing affiliation information in your system: Match institution names to ROR IDs using our matching tools (don’t forget to update metadata for existing DOIs with ROR IDs!). See Match organization names to ROR.

DOI registration

Both Crossref and DataCite now support ROR IDs in DOI metadata. Include ROR IDs in author affiliation and funding information fields to allow the entire scholarly community to leverage ROR in reporting and discovery:

When you register content with Crossref or DataCite, include ROR IDs in DOI metadata. See Include ROR IDs in Crossref DOIs and Include ROR IDs in DataCite DOIs.
If you update existing affiliation/funder organization information in your system to include ROR IDs, be sure to update your DOI metadata.

Organization lists

Do you have an internal organization list that you use for billing, agreements and other administrative workflows?

If your lists(s) include other global organization ID types such as Crossref Funder ID, GRID, ISNI, OrgRef or Wikidata, you can find the corresponding ROR IDs for those IDs. See Map other ID types to ROR.
If you're currently using GRID in your organization lists, it's important to know that GRID will end its public releases in Q4 2021 and you should plan to switch to ROR. See GRID/ROR Transition FAQ
If your lists(s) include organization names, but no IDs, you can find corresponding ROR IDs for those names. See Match organization names to ROR IDs

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ROR IDs should not be mandatory
We strongly discourage requiring ROR IDs at any point of the publication process, because doing so can hold up the manuscript submission and evaluation process if an organization is not in the ROR Registry.

Examples

OJS

A ROR plugin for OJS is available in the OJS 3.3 plugin gallery. This plugin adds support for collecting author affiliations and ROR IDs via a ROR-powered typeahead widget. OJS does not yet support including ROR IDs in DOIs, but this work is planned.

Hindawi Phenom

Hindawi's Phenom publishing platform integrates with the ROR API to retrieve persistent identifiers for author, editor, and reviewer affiliations. Learn more about Hindawi's use case.

See the ROR integrations list for more examples of ROR in the wild.