ROR stands for Research Organization Registry. This service provides the ability to assign a persistent identifier (PID) to an organisation. PIDs have many advantages: They provide a clear reference to a particular entity and the reference does not change over time. You can often refer to an organisation in several ways, for example, you can refer to it as ‘DANS’ or ‘Data Archiving and Networked Services’. Using a ROR unambiguously indicates which organisation it refers to. On DANS’ ROR page, you can find information about acronyms as well as other relevant information about the organisation. Together with other PIDs, such as ORCIDs for individual researchers, and DOIs for publications and datasets, RORs form an important part of so-called Knowledge Graphs, knowledge models in which all kinds of research information is linked.
In Data Stations and DataverseNL users can add the ROR to their affiliation when entering the metadata of their dataset.
The author’s affiliation field is linked to a list of all ROR IDs allowing a user to easily look up their organisation. If an organisation does not have an ROR-ID, the user can still enter the name of their own organisation.
A screenshot of the Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities. In the metadata of a dataset, affiliations now allow users to choose from a list of organisations based on ROR IDs.
Improve findability
When an organisation is selected from the list of ROR, the metadata export of the dataset displays the ROR ID along with the name of the organisation.
This is a great step to better harmonise the metadata of our datasets. It also allows datasets from a given organisation to be searched together more easily, as there are no longer differences in the way users enter the name of their organisation.
An example of the metadata export of a dataset in OAI_ORE format that displays the ROR.
Currently, the connection to ROR is only available for author field affiliation. However, the ROR connection is certainly also important for other fields, such as for establishing the right-holding organisation for a dataset. DANS is committed to expanding this functionality in the future and improving ROR integration.