CDL’s persistent identifier portfolio, which includes the Research Organization Registry (ROR), EZID, Name-to-Thing (N2T), and the new Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) initiative, had a busy and productive year in 2024, seeing record adoption, interest, and making significant technical improvements across its services. These complementary work streams help build a more rational, networked, and efficient research ecosystem – one where persistent identifiers allow for seamless connections between researchers, institutions, and scholarly outputs, reducing redundant efforts, unnecessary costs, and making everyone’s work more visible and impactful. As we move into 2025, I’m excited to bring you a look ahead into what we have planned for this year.
ROR
ROR is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research and funding organizations, operated as a collaborative initiative by the California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite. As a trusted, free, and openly available service, ROR has become the standard for organizational identification in the scholarly communications ecosystem. The story of ROR in 2025 will be seizing the opportunities provided by this widespread adoption with better performance, improved services, and higher-quality data.
This work will begin with a Q1 launch of a new and improved version of our affiliation matching service, which has been battle-tested in OpenAlex and used to make millions of new connections between authors, works, and institutions. From here, we will further improve our API’s performance by implementing response caching for repeat requests, speeding up response times and reducing overall resource usage. Once this is complete, we will round things out by implementing a client identification system, allowing ROR to better manage its traffic, while also keeping our API services available at the same generous level of public access.
Concurrent with this technical work, ROR will pursue a number of improvements to the quality and completeness of its data, building on work done in 2024, as well as embracing new and emerging opportunities. This will include many regional improvement efforts, with work already underway in Portugal and Japan, better representation of publishers, society organizations and funders, as well as the addition of new external identifiers and improved domain field coverage in support of all of these efforts. ROR will also continue to refine its curation processes to meet the growing needs of its community. In 2024, ROR processed over 8,000 curation requests—a 44% increase from 2023—with trends indicating that we should expect to receive 1,000 requests per month by year’s end. Our goal is to continue publishing the same, high quality data on our monthly release schedule, even in the face of this increased demand!
EZID and N2T
EZID and N2T are complementary persistent identifier services that enable reliable, long-term access to research outputs. EZID provides identifier creation and management services focused on ARKs and DOIs, while N2T serves as a global resolver that ensures identifiers remain reliable and actionable over time.
In 2024, EZID was sharply focused on improving its reliability and performance. This included moving to OpenSearch to power our search functionality and rewriting many of our background jobs and database queries to increase their speed and efficiency. This work has resulted in a more stable and high-performing service, capable of handling the large increase in traffic that resulted from EZID assuming resolution functionality for its own ARK identifiers. Building from this foundation, in 2025, we will continue to optimize our underlying systems, while also adding support for DataCite schema v4.6 and improving EZID’s user interface. Our UI updates will be focused on improving the application’s accessibility, such that all users can effectively manage their persistent identifiers. These coordinated improvements will guarantee that EZID remains a dependable and inclusive platform for persistent identifier management.
Alongside EZID’s improvements, we completed another major milestone in 2024: rebuilding N2T as a modern Python service. With the new flexibility and performance this provides, our 2025 plans include rolling out additional service enhancements for N2T that will better support ARK curation workflows, adding public-facing resolution statistics, and fully deprecating the legacy instance of this application. This work will continue to strengthen N2T’s role as essential infrastructure for all the great identifier usage that occurs outside and in parallel to the DOI ecosystem.
COMET
The COMET initiative, launched in November of 2024, seeks to address a critical problem in DOI metadata management. Currently, only record owners can update DOI metadata, even when others have improvements to contribute. This leads organizations to maintain their own enhanced versions of the same records in separate systems, resulting in duplicated effort and inconsistent representations of research outputs, both individually and in aggregate. COMET’s solution is to create an open framework that allows the community to contribute validated metadata improvements directly to DOI records, unlocking tremendous new value and efficiencies at the sources of this metadata.
To date, COMET has brought together experts from publishers, libraries, funding organizations, and infrastructure services in a series of listening sessions focused on the vision, product definition, and governance model for a service that would realize its goals. In March 2025, these efforts will culminate in a community call-to-action, soliciting partnerships, funding, and other resources to help build this service. Subscribe to COMET’s email list to receive up-to-date news or follow its LinkedIn page for updates.
As I hope this all conveys, it has never been a better, more energizing time to both help build and participate in the persistent identifier ecosystem. Here’s to 2025 and all the exciting work ahead for the UC3 and the scholarly communications community!
