Some of the most frequent questions ROR receives are about what it means when an organization is in ROR, and how organizations end up in the registry in the first place. Many of you are understandably curious about how ROR records are added and updated. So, we thought this would be a good time to talk about how the registry is being maintained and how this process evolving. What does it mean if an organization is in ROR?

The Research Organization Registry is a cross-organizational and multi-stakeholder initiative. ROR is run by a small group of steering organizations in collaboration with a broad network of community advisors and supporters.

We’re more than halfway through 2020, and it has already been a year like no other. In the midst of global upheaval and uncertainty, work on the Research Organization Registry continues. Building and sustaining community and connections through open scholarly infrastructure seems more important than ever.

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.