18 July 2023
As use cases build in the global research ecosystem around persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research organizations, ORCID has recently increased its financial commitment to the first and only openly available organization identifier—Research Organization Registry (ROR).
Like ORCID, ROR operates an open, community-driven, noncommercial PID registry that is part of the interconnected network of global scholarly infrastructure. However, instead of disambiguating people as ORCID does, ROR disambiguates institution names, captures affiliations, links affiliation metadata to research outputs, and exchanges affiliation information across scholarly systems, making it an indispensable component of a research ecosystem that connects researchers with their research. ROR data is freely and openly available for anyone to use. As a demonstration of our intention to help ensure ROR’s success well into the future, ORCID recently increased its financial support of ROR by contributing $100,000 towards its sustenance and growth. We expect to be able to continue our annual support of ROR at this level for the foreseeable future.
“Having just celebrated ORCID’s 10th anniversary last year, we are able to more clearly see the outcomes of the early financial support that made ORCID the sustainable organization it is today,” said ORCID Executive Director Chris Shillum, who is also on ROR’s steering group. “Increasing our funding to ROR is one way of paying it forward to help increase the reliability and interoperability of the open PID infrastructure at the core of the research ecosystem.”
Maria Gould, ROR’s Project Lead based at California Digital Library (CDL), coordinates ROR’s operations and develops its strategic vision. She says that ORCID’s contribution will help accelerate efforts to drive widespread adoption of ROR IDs in research infrastructure.
“The ROR API is now receiving 23 million requests per month and climbing, and we are investing in infrastructure improvements to ensure we can scale to meet increased demand,” said Gould.
“As adoption continues to grow, we are actively responding to more feedback about additions and updates to registry records, as well as conducting ongoing metadata QA, to maintain the high degree of data quality and frequency of data updates that our users depend upon. ORCID’s support provides key resourcing for the increased infrastructure and staffing costs that this work requires.”
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