Last month we were very proud to announce the launch of OrgRef – a completely free dataset sharing open data about the most important academic and research organizations worldwide.
Reference data about organizations is important because it helps publishers to standardize their own customer data, and to identify new sales prospects. We believe it’s equally important for that data to be free for anyone to use, for the benefit of the entire publishing supply chain.
OrgRef extracts structured information about organizations from Wikipedia and other existing open resources. It aims to cover the most important academic and research organizations worldwide, sharing basic metadata about each one (e.g. name, country, URL) along with standard ID numbers from ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) and VIAF (Virtual International Authority File).
The entire dataset is available to download now from the OrgRef website. It will be managed and maintained long term by DataSalon, and we’ll also be offering a range of related paid services for matching, merging, and analysing OrgRef in combination with a publisher’s own customer data.
OrgRef has been in development and testing for over 6 months, and is now in ‘public beta’. We are seeking feedback from all interested parties, so please go and take a look at: http://www.orgref.org.
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