A ROR-Ing Recap From PIDapalooza

In the days following the ROR community meeting in Dublin, we had a chance to spread the word about ROR in presentations at PIDapalooza, the annual festival for persistent identifiers. Members of the ROR project team led an interactive session that included an affiliation-matching game to demonstrate the messiness of identifying and aligning metadata about an institution, and discuss how ROR IDs can address these challenges. The session culminated with participants looking up the ROR IDs for their own institutions and drawing them on their very own lion masks, reflecting the twin themes of uniqueness and community that are so central to ROR’s aims.

In another session, California Digital Library’s Maria Gould and Daniella Lowenberg spoke about integrating ROR IDs into data publishing platforms like Dryad to capture affiliation information for datasets and fill a crucial missing piece in the tracking and reporting of institutional research outputs.

We also heard ROR referenced in several other sessions during the course of the conference, from Carolyn Grant’s “Implementation of Organizational IDs in NASA’s ADS Abstract Service” to Arthur Smith’s “Who Moved My Institution: A PID Integration Story” to the British Library’s “From Standard to Community Resource: A View on ISNIs and ORG IDs.”

Mentions of ROR at PIDapalooza extended to the virtual sphere as well, with a number of enthusiastic reactions on Twitter:

Great to see @ResearchOrgs poster at #PIDapalooza19. I helped do some of the early technical exploration so very pleased to see it moving forward. Collaboratively maintained data infrastructure #opendata pic.twitter.com/5XrpuFkM74

— Leigh Dodds (@ldodds) January 23, 2019

As someone who registers DOIs via @CrossrefOrg (for @museumsvictoria), I'm so very excited about this! Three cheers for open persistent identifiers! #RORId #PIDs @ResearchOrgs @DaniLowenberg @CalDigLib pic.twitter.com/B7PuPhRh55

— Nicole Kearney (@nicolekearney) January 24, 2019

A common theme in PIDapalooza sessions and in surrounding discussions was the power and value of interconnecting PIDs and the importance of ensuring that new identifiers like ROR map to other identifiers in use across systems and platforms. To which we say, we concur! The PIDapalooza community is working on many important and inspiring projects and we’re excited to be in this space together.