The end of January 2022 marked the third anniversary of ROR’s launch at PIDapalooza 2019 in Dublin. Continuing with a tradition from the prior two years (2020 in Lisbon, and 2021 on Zoom), we marked the occasion with a community celebration to reflect on ROR’s progress and discuss the work that lies ahead. The 2022 ROR annual meeting consisted of 2 virtual sessions with around 100 community members from 26 different countries.

ROR is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join as our Technical Lead, based at DataCite. You will be leading, developing, and architecting ROR services and infrastructure. ROR is a collaborative effort with resourcing from multiple organizations.

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) has been added to the ORCID Registry as a disambiguated Organization ID. ROR can now be used with the ORCID API and Affiliation Manager to record research institution identifiers and metadata, thus making it easier to track the impact of institutional research.

ROR is looking for a data manager to lead metadata curation activities for the registry, including coordinating registry updates and maintenance, working with ROR’s community curation advisors, and developing and implement long-term curation policies and practices. This is an exciting time to join the ROR team and support ROR’s emerging independent, community-based curation model. The job description and application instructions follow below.

In July, ROR and GRID announced that the two registries would begin to diverge in Q4 2021 following GRID’s final public release. GRID has now completed its latest and final public release (available here). ROR has incorporated the updates in this release into its own data. With these two releases, there is a 1:1 correspondence of GRID IDs to ROR IDs, and vice versa. The new ROR dataset includes IDs and metadata for 102,392 organizations.

ROR adoption is ramping up, and we’ve been hard at work during the past few months creating resources (or should we say ROR -sources?!) to support those of you integrating ROR into your systems. We’re excited to share the following new resources with you: Support site & code examples ROR is all grown up and has its very own support site!

Earlier today, GRID announced that it will discontinue its schedule of public releases in Q4 2021. This decision marks an important and exciting milestone in the evolution of both organization registries.

ROR is releasing our first-ever Annual Report. Adopting the model of annual reports distributed by nonprofit organizations, this document aims to provide an overview of ROR’s progress in 2020 and a preview of work to come in 2021.

In the same week that ROR celebrated its third birthday, PIDapalooza celebrated the fifth festival of persistent identifiers, also as a virtual event. Across three tracks, seven languages, and twenty-hour hours, PIDapalooza21 highlighted the latest updates from the wide world of persistent identifiers, with a focus how open infrastructure and rich metadata are key to harnessing the power of PIDs.

ROR had a birthday last week and marked the occasion just like anyone else celebrating a birthday during the pandemic: with a virtual party! More than eighty attendees from around the world came together for the now third annual ROR community meeting, held this year on Zoom across two sessions to reach ROR’s global community in as many timezones as possible.

The scholarly community depends on a network of open identifier and metadata infrastructure. Content identifiers and contributor identifiers are foundational components of this network. But an additional component has long been missing from this picture: open, stakeholder-governed infrastructure for research organization identifiers and their associated metadata. ROR launched in January 2019 with the specific aim of filling this gap.