Version 4.3 of the DataCite Metadata Schema released during August, 2019 included (among other things), the capability to provide persistent identifiers for affiliated organizations in the metadata (Dasler and deSmaele, Identify your affiliation with Metadata Schema 4.3, 2019). This capability builds on the work and enthusiasm generated by the ROR Community that has championed the concept of open organization identifiers for several years

ROR had a party in Portugal last month! Sixty friends - some new, some old - came together in Lisbon on the eve of PIDapalooza 2020 to celebrate ROR’s unofficial first birthday, marking one year since the registry debuted at a community meeting in Dublin in January 2019.

What a year it has been! Here's what happened in ROR's first year and what we plan for the future.

As we announced previously, ROR launched a fundraising campaign in October to ensure the registry’s long-term sustainability. We are grateful for the community supporters who have already contributed to this campaign. The first round of supporters was announced a couple of weeks ago.

ROR launched in January 2019 with records for nearly 100,000 research organizations, all with unique IDs and associated metadata. ROR data is useful for a variety of reasons and for a variety of users, including both humans and machines. It is essential for ROR to have robust mechanisms for searching, retrieving, and filtering.

ROR is thrilled to announce that we are welcoming new members to the ROR Steering Group.

ROR launched a fundraising campaign in October to call on community stakeholders to pitch in toward supporting ROR’s long-term sustainability. While the overall goal of this campaign is to raise $175,000 from community supporters over the next two years, we set an initial target of $75,000 by the end of 2019.

ROR is the Research Organization Registry, a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world.

How many datasets have been published in Dryad from researchers at the University of California? This question is surprisingly complicated.

ROR is an open registry for every research organization in the world, aiming to solve the problem of identifying which organizations are affiliated with which research outputs.

In the days following the ROR community meeting in Dublin, we had a chance to spread the word about ROR in presentations at PIDapalooza, the annual festival for persistent identifiers. Members of the ROR project team led an interactive session that included an affiliation-matching game to demonstrate the messiness of identifying and aligning metadata about an institution, and discuss how ROR IDs can address these challenges.