DataSalon are ready to ROR!

Last October, we reviewed the status of the Research Organization Registry (ROR) project to create unique IDs for research organizations worldwide. A year on, ROR is making good progress – the current version of the registry contains over 98,000 research organizations, each with a unique persistent identifier and associated metadata.

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted DataSalon on the ROR integrations page – we’re now supporting ROR in both MasterVision and PaperStack. As ROR is still so closely related to the GRID dataset, we’re including ROR_IDs as standard for client sites which use GRID as a reference database of organizations, pulling the IDs into the GRID data in order to allow searching and display (with hyperlinks out to the associated ROR pages). ROR_IDs can also be added to MasterVision or PaperStack implementations using Ringgold on request, using a combination of our automatching and mapping tools.

Once the ROR and GRID datasets start to diverge, our aim will be to offer ROR as an alternative reference database to GRID or Ringgold. ROR will have the advantage of being free like GRID but, unlike GRID, having more input from the organizations themselves – ROR’s aim being to allow organizations to maintain their own records. For it to be viable to use ROR as a reference database, we’re going to have to wait until ROR includes more metadata – in particular more location details and information on relationships between organizations. This all appears on the current ROR roadmap – so watch this space!