“At its core, ROR is focused on filling a very specific and crucially important gap in scholarly research and publishing infrastructure: information about the organizations affiliated with researchers and research outputs. The rise of DOIs to identify datasets and publications and ORCID IDs to identify researchers and contributors has facilitated more efficient discovery and tracking of research outputs. But without being able to identify where these outputs and authors are affiliated, this discovery and tracking can only go so far. At best, an immense amount of additional and manual work is involved in extracting this information to fill the gap. At worst? The gap never gets filled in. With ROR IDs, the idea is that both of these scenarios no longer happen. ROR is intended for use by the research community, for the purposes of increasing the use of organization identifiers in the community and enabling connections between organization records in various systems.

ROR and Dryad joined forces this spring to tackle two different yet related challenges. Following the launch of the MVR, ROR was interested in finding a partner to pilot a simple yet effective implementation of the ROR API. Dryad was interested in implementing a solution to the problem of missing affiliation data. As a longstanding community partner in data publishing and open infrastructure projects, the Dryad team was eager to be an early adopter of ROR and blaze the trail toward wider implementation and collection of ROR IDs across multiple systems and platforms….”