On 16 September, Digital Science released the final public version of their GRID database. After six years of providing the best free reference dataset of organisational identifiers, they have passed the baton to ROR (the Research Organization Registry).
If you currently use GRID identifiers in your data and are concerned about the practicalities of switching to ROR, don’t panic! ROR has a new technical support site, with lots of helpful advice about migrating from GRID to ROR. The two share exactly the same data structure – in particular, the detailed location and hierarchical information which was missing from early versions of ROR is now included in full. Currently, the content itself also matches – this will change as future releases of ROR include corrections and new additions, but in the meantime the one-to-one mapping between GRID and ROR IDs will simplify implementation and testing of any migration project.
For those using GRID in their MasterVision or PaperStack sites, things are even simpler – DataSalon will do everything for you. We’ve already updated our set of automatching tools to allow us to match customer data using ROR as the reference dataset – thus, we’ll be able to carry on standardising data, removing duplicates and correcting errors just as we were already doing with GRID. These updated tools have been fully tested and we’ll be starting to migrate client sites from GRID to ROR shortly.
Going forwards, ROR will continue to provide the same extensive worldwide coverage of research organisations as GRID, with the added advantage of being community-led. This means it will benefit from the input of data experts from a range of sectors (libraries, platform providers, funders, publishers, and so on), ensuring that it continues to meet the needs of its many users.
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