Documentation

Research Organization Registry (ROR)

ROR is an open registry of persistent identifiers for research organisations. A ROR ID identifies the institution behind a piece of research, so affiliations become machine-readable and connectable rather than free text that has to be matched by guesswork.

We co-founded ROR and run it jointly with DataCite and the California Digital Library. Much of its day-to-day work is carried out by Crossref staff: community engagement and communications, metadata curation, technical support, and financial administration. ROR is not a membership organisation, and there are no fees for using the registry or its API. For more on how it’s governed and funded, see our ROR service page.

If you have questions about ROR, ask us. You don’t need to go elsewhere for support: support@crossref.org, or the ROR tag on our community forum.

Including ROR IDs in your metadata

ROR IDs belong in the affiliation metadata you deposit with us, for both contributors and grant recipients.

• Affiliations covers how to mark up institutional affiliations, including ROR IDs, in your XML deposits
• Contributors covers the contributor element that affiliations sit within
• Grants covers ROR IDs for grant records, where they identify both the funder and the recipient organisation

If you deposit through a service provider or a manual form rather than XML, your provider may already be adding ROR IDs on your behalf. It’s worth asking them.

Checking your coverage

Your Participation Report shows how many of your records carry ROR IDs in author or grantee affiliations, so you can see your coverage and track it as you improve.

See reports for more on what Participation Reports cover.

Retrieving ROR IDs

ROR IDs travel with the rest of our metadata, so anything that retrieves Crossref metadata returns them where they’re present. See retrieve metadata for the general options.

For the registry itself—searching organisations, resolving a ROR ID, bulk data dumps—use ROR’s own API and documentation at ror.readme.io. That’s maintained by the ROR team, which includes our staff.

Why this matters

Affiliation strings are one of the messiest parts of the scholarly record. The same university can appear hundreds of ways across records, which makes it hard to answer basic questions: what has this institution published, what has it been funded for, where is its research being used.

ROR IDs turn that into a connection rather than a matching problem, and they’re one of the relationships that make the Research Nexus work.