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Hear Us ROR! Announcing Our First Prototype and Next Steps

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right!

Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.

We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community. Here are the links to our latest work, a recap of everything that happened in Dublin, some of the next steps for the project, and how the community can continue to be involved.

🎉 Ta da! The first ROR prototype

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is finally here! We’re thrilled to officially announce the launch of our ROR MVR (minimum viable registry). The MVR consists of the following components, which are ready for anyone to use right now.

Screenshot of ROR search frontend

Screenshot of an example ROR record

Community meeting recap

On January 22, 60+ representatives from across the research and publishing community gathered in Dublin to see what the ROR project team has been up to, demo the first prototypes in action, and discuss where we want to go next – and, of course, to practice ROR-ing together.

Photo of ROR project team members in lion masks

In the second half of the meeting, attendees split into discussion groups to identify specific aspirations for ROR and brainstorm concrete actions needed to achieve these goals, focusing on the main use case of exposing and capturing all research outputs of a given institution. The proposed ideas covered a spectrum of possibilities for ROR, highlighting the following themes:

ROR as seamlessly-integrated and sometimes invisible infrastructure

ROR as a critical piece of funder workflows and infrastructure

ROR as a trusted registry, collaborative partner, and responsible steward

What we’re hearing

Now that the ROR MVR is here, we’re hearing some really good questions about the data we’re capturing, how it can be used, and how we’ll be maintaining the registry going forward. We wanted to take a moment to respond to some of these questions.

What is the criteria for being listed in ROR? What is a “research organization”?

We define the notion of “research organization” quite broadly as any organization that conducts, produces, manages, or touches research. This is in line with ROR’s stated scope, which is to address the affiliation use case and be able to identify which organizations are associated with which research outputs. We use “affiliation” to describe any formal relationship between a researcher and an organization associated with researchers, including but not limited to their employer, educator, funder, or scholarly society.

Will ROR map organizational hierarchies?

No – ROR is focused on being a top-level registry of organizations so we can address the fundamental affiliation use case, and provide a critical source of metadata that can interoperate with other institutional identifiers.

ROR IDs are cool – what can I do with them?

Now that we have built our MVR, we will be working to incorporate ROR IDs into relevant pieces of the scholarly communication infrastructure. If you are a publisher, funder, metadata provider, research office, or anyone else interested in capturing affiliations, please get in touch with us to discuss how we might coordinate. If you are a developer, you are welcome to start playing around with the API: https://api.ror.org/organizations.

There’s an error in my organization’s ROR record — can you fix it?

For the time being, please email info@ror.org to request an update to an existing record in ROR or request that a new record be added. We will formalize our data management policies and procedures in the next stage of the project.

What is ROR’s relationship to other organizational identifiers?

For ROR to be useful, it needs to augment the current offerings in a way that is open, trusted, complementary, and collaborative, and not intentionally competitive. We are committed to providing a service that the community finds helpful and not duplicative, and enables as many connections as possible between organization records across systems.

I have my own dataset of institutional affiliations — can I give it to ROR?

We are always happy to hear about other efforts to capture affiliation data. Please get in touch with us to discuss how we might coordinate.

Can ROR support multiple languages and character sets?

GRID already supports multiple languages and character sets, so by extension ROR will have this enabled as well. Here is one example: https://ror.org/01k4yrm29.

How will ROR handle curation, i.e., updating records if an organization changes its name or ceases to exist?

The curation and long-term management of records will be a cornerstone of our efforts in 2019 and we hope to release a working set of policies and procedures soon.

What’s next for ROR

Now that we have our MVR, what happens next for ROR? We’re eager to sustain the momentum from January’s stakeholder meeting at the same time we know there are some longer-term plans to put in place, and so we’re looking at both some immediate tasks as well as bigger-picture questions.

Product development

We have a few to-do items on our list following the launch of the MVR to keep everything running smoothly while we develop a comprehensive long-term product roadmap.

As a reminder, you can access the existing code in Github: https://github.com/ror-community

Policy development

We’ve been emphasizing here and in community conversations that our primary focus now turns to formulating policies and procedures to ensure the successful management of ROR data over the long term. This is something we can’t (and shouldn’t) do on our own — we want to work with community stakeholders to develop the right solutions and establish the right frameworks. We understand the urgency of firming up these policies, but we are also aware that something this important can take time to complete and is not something to rush into lightly.

Community development

To help guide the next stages of the project, we are putting out an open call for participation in the ROR community advisory group. Advisory group members will be involved in giving input on data management, testing out new features, giving feedback on the product roadmap, and discussing ideas for events and outreach. We plan to convene this advisory group through bimonthly calls and asynchronous communication channels through the end of the year. We hope you will consider joining us! Please email info@ror.org if you are interested.

For those who want to stay informed about the project but not necessarily be part of the advisory group, you have other options!

You can also always drop us a line at info@ror.org, and let us know if you’d ever like to set up a meeting or conference call to talk about the project in more detail.

Final thoughts

Community engagement has been vital to ROR’s beginnings and will likewise be critically important for the next steps that we take. As both a registry of identifiers and a community of stakeholders involved in building open scholarly infrastructure, ROR depends on guidance and involvement at multiple levels. Thank you for being part of the journey thus far, and for joining us on the road that lies ahead. 🦁

This has been cross-posted from the ROR blog

RFI for organizational identifier registry

Organizations/institutions are a key part of the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, we lack an openly licensed, independently run organizational identifier standard to use for common affiliation and citation use cases.

To define a solution to this problem, a group of interested parties drafted and shared a proposal at last year’s PIDapalooza.  Based on that discussion, earlier this year Crossref, DataCite and ORCID announced the formation of an Organization Identifier Working Group and UC3 has supported this effort by our Director, John Chodacki, serving as chair of the Working Group.

Image Credit: ORCID

Scope of Work

The primary goal of our working group (loosely codenamed OrgID or Open PIIR – Open Persistent Institutional​ Identifier Registry) is to build a plan for how to best fill this gap and our main uses were to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

The working group used a series of breakout groups to refine the structure, principles, and technology specifications for an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry. We worked in three interdependent areas: Governance, Product Definition, and Business Model, and recently released for public comment our findings and recommendations for governance and product requirements.

Summary of findings & recommendations

After 9 months, the recommendations are the creation of an open, independent organization/institution identifier registry:

Request for Information

Our working group has now issued a Request for Information (RFI) to solicit comment and to hear from groups interested in hosting and/or developing this registry.

We’d like to hear from you!  Please help spread the word!

Before drafting responses, please also see our original A Way Forward document for additional framing principles. Also, please note that all responses will be reviewed by a subgroup of the Organization Identifier Working Group (that will exclude any RFI respondents).

 

Update: revised November 1, 2017

As posted above, the working group issued a Request for Information (RFI) on 9 October 2017 to solicit comment and interest from the broader research community in developing the Registry. We have received a number of questions about the RFI. The purpose of this post is to clarify the RFI, the process for reviewing responses, and the next steps for developing the registry. Please use this template to respond to the RFI.

(1) When are the responses due?

We have extended the deadline for responses to 1 December 2017.

(2) Who should be responding?

Any organization interested in (i) providing open data, (ii) participating in a governance role, (iii) serving as technical and/or administrative host for the Registry organization , and / or (iv) providing technology, staffing, or marketing resources.

(3) How much detail should the response include?

A general description of your interest (see (2) above), and a short description of the resources you could bring to the Registry will suffice. We are not requesting a detailed cost proposal. While framing your responses, please see the Governance and Product documents for requirements and principles. Please use this template to respond to the RFI.

(4) How will the responses be reviewed?

Responses will be received by the Organization Identifier Steering Group.  In early December, they will develop a summary and list of respondents to share with the full Working Group and the Executive Committees of Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID boards for review. We propose a meeting of stakeholders in late January, potentially the day before the PIDapalooza meeting, to discuss options with the respondents for a collaborative approach to developing the Registry. From there, next steps will be proposed.

(6) Who do I contact if I have more questions?

Please email the Org ID steering group with any questions.  Or, if you have any other questions/comments about the involvement of CDL’s UC3 team, let us know at uc3@ucop.edu