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If you manage a publishing system or workflow, you know how crucial—and how challenging!—it is to have clean, consistent, and comprehensive affiliation metadata. Author affiliations, and the ability to link them to publications and other scholarly outputs, are vital for numerous stakeholders across the research landscape. Institutions need to monitor and measure their research output by the articles their researchers have published. Funders need to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported. Academic librarians need to easily find all of the publications associated with their campus. Journals need to know where authors are affiliated so they can determine eligibility for institutionally sponsored publishing agreements.

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organisation Registry community, you’d be absolutely right!

Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.

We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community. Here are the links to our latest work, a recap of everything that happened in Dublin, some of the next steps for the project, and how the community can continue to be involved.

Cross-posted on the blogs of University of California (UC3), ORCID, and DataCite: https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.5438/67sj-4y05.

Over the past couple of years, a group of organisations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organisation identifier registry.  The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities. As the working group chair, I wanted to provide an update on this initiative and let you know where our efforts are headed.

About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID [announced a joint initiative] (https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organisation-identifier-project-way-forward) to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. Today we publish governance recommendations and product principles and requirements for the creation of an open, independent organisation identifier registry and invite community feedback.

At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organisation identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.

The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success.  Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry.