The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations. Its purpose is to provide globally unique persistent identifiers for research organizations in the same way that ORCIDs provide globally unique persistent identifiers for researchers and DOIs provide globally unique persistent identifiers for research outputs. The ROR ID for the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Monterrey, Mexico, for instance, is https://ror.org/03ayjn504, and the link to the ROR record at https://ror.org/03ayjn504 leads to an open web page with information about that organization.
ROR IDs are useful in scholarly publishing systems such as OJS to ensure that organization data is clean and consistent. When a researcher submits a piece of research to a system, they provide not just their own name but also the name of the organization they are affiliated with. Different researchers at the same organization might enter the organization’s name differently if they simply type it out as text: one researcher might enter their affiliation in English as “Monterrey Institute of Technology,” for instance, while another researcher at the same organization might enter their affiliation in Spanish as “Tecnológico de Monterrey.” If these affiliations are stored as text, it will be difficult for both users and systems to recognize that these two different names represent the same organization.
Instead of asking researchers to type in their organization name manually, then, systems such as OJS can offer a ROR-powered list of standardized organization names for researchers to choose from after they begin to type. That way, the system can store and display standard metadata about organizations, which allows for more consistent search and discovery. Users who want to find all research produced by the Monterrey Institute of Technology, for instance, will not miss items whose authors entered the name of their affiliated organization in Spanish. This metadata consistency is useful both within individual systems and for interoperability, indexing, and data exchange with and by other systems.
The Research Organization Registry lists well over 100,000 organizations from around the world. All records are entirely open and public domain. Anyone can request that a research organization be added to ROR or that information in a ROR record be corrected, and these requests are reviewed by ROR staff and community volunteers.