John Chodacki
Director, University of California Curation Center (UC3)
California Digital Library
The Research Organization Registry (ROR) launched in early 2019 with a mission to provide open, trusted, and noncommercial infrastructure for research organization metadata. ROR fills a crucial gap in scholarly communications. Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are increasingly central to the research landscape in the United States and beyond: researchers are using ORCID IDs, and DOIs are assigned to articles, datasets, dissertations, and other outputs, and these PIDs facilitate access to research as well as the tracking of research use and impact. But without an identifier for the institutions affiliated with authors and outputs, ORCIDs and DOIs only take us so far. ROR is the missing piece of the PID puzzle. ROR is a comprehensive and authoritative registry of organizations (close to 100,000 at present), all with unique IDs. ROR is uniquely focused on accessible infrastructure by and for the scholarly community. Its scope encompasses all research organizations and its aim is explicitly toward and driven by the needs of research stakeholders. Librarians and academic administrators increasingly need access to data on their institutions’ publications and research outputs to support reporting requirements, funder and federal mandates, institutional Open Access policies, and library collection development and licensing negotiations. As a community initiative, ROR has been built through collaborations and donations of in-kind resources, and developed with input from a range of advisors and stakeholders with experience that spans libraries, publishing, research administration, and PIDs. ROR is currently scaling up its operations and establishing a sustainability model to secure the necessary resources to keep the project operational, ensure the registry data can always be open and free, and maintain the registry as a community-based effort. In this talk, the ROR project team will update the CNI membership on our progress toward a sustainability model and solicit feedback from the community about next steps and strategic directions in this area.