Blog

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Amanda French, Ginny Hendricks, Rachael Lammey, Fabienne Michaud, Maria Gould – 2023 September 07

In Open Funder RegistryResearch FundersROROrganisation IdentifierIdentifiersMetadata

There is some overlap between the Open Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Open Funder Registry IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders when they appear in both registries. We aim to merge the two registries over time. We will ensure Crossref members can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Just yesterday, we published a summary of a recent workshop between funders and publishers on funding metadata workflows that we convened with the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Sesame Open Science. As the report notes, “open funding metadata is arguably the next big thing” [in Open Science]. That being the case, we think this is the ideal time to strengthen our support of open funding metadata by beginning the transition to ROR.

Comparing the features of ROR and the Open Funder Registry

Let’s look at some of the similarities and differences between the two registries, including their history, features, scope, and usage, since there are important nuances and distinctions that are helpful to understand.

Overview

History

The Open Funder Registry was launched as FundRef over a decade ago to enable the community to cite research funding and support and assert it within the scholarly record, acknowledging the organisations granting their support. Elsevier generously donated the seed data for the Open Funder Registry and has managed its curation for the last ten years, while we have maintained the technical operations and promoted community adoption of the Open Funder Registry.

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) was introduced in 2019 by the California Digital Library, DataCite, and Crossref to enable the community to cite contributor affiliations and assert them within the scholarly record, acknowledging the organisations that housed or performed the research. Digital Science generously donated the seed data for the Research Organization Registry from its Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) initiative, and Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library have contributed labour and resources to turn ROR into a mature, independent, freely available service.

Scope

One key difference between the registries is that ROR has always included funding organisations, and ROR records have always included mappings to Funder IDs where available, while the reverse is not true: the Open Funder Registry includes only funding organisations, not other kinds of organisations, and Open Funder Registry records do not currently include mappings to ROR IDs or other identifiers. It therefore makes sense to expand our initial contributor affiliation use case for ROR to include the identification of organisations that fund and support research.

Usage

More Crossref members use Funder IDs than use ROR IDs, to be sure. You can see from the table above that the number of Crossref members using Funder IDs in Crossref records is higher by almost a factor of 10 than the number of Crossref members using ROR IDs in Crossref records. But note too that the current rate of adoption is far higher for ROR than it is for the Open Funder Registry. Since January of 2022, we’ve seen a gratifying number of publishers and service providers beginning to use ROR identifiers for contributor affiliations in Crossref. In the last year, the number of Crossref members depositing ROR IDs has increased by 356%, while the number depositing Funder IDs has increased only by 12%. As evidenced by its ballooning API traffic, too, with more than 20 million requests last month,³ ROR is clearly being used by many scholarly research systems for many purposes. The more systems that use an identifier, the more valuable that identifier becomes as a vehicle for exchanging information.

ROR’s primary use case is to identify contributor affiliations and is already being used by funders. Nineteen funding organisations are depositing ROR IDs in their grant records with Crossref to denote principal investigator affiliations,⁴ and, following a meeting of the our Funder Advisory Group last month, all eighty funder members are primed to start using ROR IDs to identify themselves in grant records.

Tools and services

Both the Open Funder Registry and ROR have open data and open source code, but we think that our suite of free and open source utilities for ROR gives it an advantage. We know that publishers and their service providers have ongoing challenges in collecting and matching funding information from authors and in validating Funder IDs. With our extensive ROR toolkit, publishers and their technology providers who adopt ROR will be in a better position to improve the accuracy of funding acknowledgements in metadata, which can in turn enable the development of reliable analytics, tools, and services for funders, regulators, research facilities, and the public.

Crossref has built tools based on OpenRefine for both the Open Funder Registry and ROR: the Open Funder Registry Reconciliation Service and the ROR Reconciler are both useful ways to clean messy data. ROR, however, also offers a much-used API endpoint that helps match organisation names to ROR IDs, and several third parties have also developed and shared open source matching tools and services for ROR. Crossref is also collaborating on new strategies for affiliation matching that will improve connections for funding acknowledgements.

Community engagement models

The Open Funder Registry has been curated for over a decade through time and expertise generously donated by Elsevier and is community-governed by Crossref and it’s membership and board. ROR offers more transparent community involvement and is jointly governed by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library. ROR is openly curated and is aided by a global Curation Advisory Board of volunteers.

What will this mean for you?

The many organisations whose tools, services, and workflows have been architected to use Open Funder Registry (OFR) IDs will find this transition a challenge, and we don’t want to make light of that issue. Over the last ten years, we have encouraged the community to adopt Funder IDs, and the community has demonstrably recognized the benefits of doing so. Publishers have put a great deal of time, thought, and effort into collecting funder data and including it in Crossref metadata, and they have built internal reports and workflows around the Open Funder Registry. Crossref is committed to making the transition from the Open Funder Registry to the Research Organization Registry as simple as possible for the community.

If you are not already using the Open Funder Registry and are planning to begin standardizing funding data, we recommend that you use ROR to identify funders. If you are currently using the Open Funder Registry in your systems and workflows, don’t worry! In the medium term, Open Funder Registry IDs aren’t going away. Eventually, however, the Open Funder Registry may cease to be updated. Funder IDs and their mapping to ROR IDs will be maintained, so if Crossref members submit a Funder ID, it will get mapped to a ROR ID automatically. Note, too, that Crossref is committed to maintaining the current funder API endpoints.

In short, if you are already using Funder IDs, you can and should continue to do so. However, we do recommend that you begin looking at what it will take to integrate ROR into your systems and workflows for identifying funders as well as affiliations.

We face challenges in this transition, too. Of these, we think the largest will be (1) completing the reconciliation work involved in mapping Funder IDs to ROR IDs, and (2) updating Crossref’s schemas, APIs, and deposit tools to support ROR IDs in many the ways we currently support Funder IDs. We’ll discuss both of these challenges in future blog posts.

Tell us what you need?

We want to hear from you. You can use our Community Forum talk to us about the Crossref Open Funder Registry or contact ROR staff at Crossref via our request form. You can attend online Crossref events, including ROR-specific webinars to get updates from us and ask us your questions.

One of the major messages we’re already hearing from funders and publishers is expressed in yesterday’s post on open funding metadata: “While many concluded that there was still a long way to go to solve the many technical challenges related to funding metadata, attendees were unanimous on its importance.” We look forward to beginning this important work together.