Highlights from the 2025 ROR Annual Community Meeting

It’s been six years since the initial launch of ROR, and our Annual Community Meeting has become a welcome tradition for the ROR community in every new year. It’s a chance for us to reflect on the past year, look ahead to the coming year, and express our gratitude for the diverse and growing community of research and information professionals who use and support ROR. Last year, more than 300 people registered for one of the ROR Annual Community Meeting sessions, and this year, that number grew to more than 500 registrants from 58 different countries, making this our most well-attended and most international Annual Community Meeting to date! If you weren’t one of those who registered or attended, here are some highlights.

Reflecting on 2024 and planning for 2025

ROR Director Maria Gould began this year’s “state of ROR” Community Update session by reflecting on the core values of openness and community that led to the creation of ROR and that continue to guide ROR today. She then gave a general overview of how these values are realized in ROR’s operations and governance.

ROR Product Lead Adam Buttrick and ROR Metadata Manager Riley Marsh reported on ROR data curation activities. In 2024, we added more than 4,000 new records to ROR and enhanced existing records with language tags and organization domains. Areas of focus for ROR’s data in 2025 include improving regional coverage for countries such as Japan and Portugal, adding new external identifiers to ROR records, and improving coverage of funders, scholarly societies, and publishers.

ROR Technical Lead Liz Krznarich reminded us that ROR reached a major milestone in 2024 with the launch of version 2 of the ROR schema and API. Four major technical projects are planned for 2025: improving the ROR API’s ability to match affiliation strings to ROR IDs, speeding up the overall response times of the API, implementing client identification, and sunsetting v1 of the ROR schema and API at the end of the year.

ROR Technical Community Manager Amanda French showcased some key ROR adoptions in 2024, including the American Physical Society and Web of Science, and mentioned that we’re looking forward to seeing ROR incorporated into Atypon and OJS 3.5 in 2025 as well as seeing increased use of ROR IDs to identify funders as well as author affiliations.

During the session, participants told us about their recent and forthcoming work with ROR, as well, and we discussed interesting questions such as “Which kinds of curation requests are the hardest to resolve?” We followed the Community Update with an informal, unrecorded drop-in session where we continued these and other discussions.

Learning how different countries use and encourage persistent identifiers

The National PID Policies and Practices panel included perspectives from the UK, the US, Czechia, Germany, Brazil, and Ireland. Rachael Kotarski, formerly with the British Library and now with the University of Chicago, mentioned that one key difference between the UK’s work to form a national persistent identifier strategy and the US’s nascent efforts to do the same is that the US is less focused on research assessment than the UK, so the key driving force in the US tends to be the minimum requirements by national funders for persistent identifier support in repositories.

Taras Hrendaš of the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic explained the methodology behind their annual evaluation of Czech research statistics, which they derive using a combination of data from their national CRIS system (IS VaVaI) and data from Web of Science. Institutional affiliation incoherence is a major problem for their data analysis, so the incorporation of ROR into the Web of Science will be a tremendous help for next year’s analysis.

Among the insights uncovered by Germany’s PID Network Deutschland, represented by Andreas Czerniak standing in for Steffi Genderjahn, is that the best-known PIDs are the DOI, ISBN, and ORCID, followed by GND, URN, and ROR. Andreas also announced the recent launch of the first version of Germany’s PID Monitor. Exciting!

Washington Segundo of Brazil’s IBICT gave an overview of six key components national research infrastructure in Brazil, including a national repository of theses and dissertations (BDTD), a portal to publication and data repositories (Oasisbr), the Brazilian current research information system (BrCris), an open repository and data lake that collects and processes FAIR data (Laguna), a directory of Brazilian electronic scientific journals (Miguilim), and a project to develop an open and non-centralized source of persistent identifiers (dARK). Despite technical, financial, and cultural challenges, IBICT is working to expand Open Science infrastructure in Brazil, disseminate the country’s scientific production, and reduce dependence on commercial platforms.

Finally, Michelle Doran of Ireland’s National Open Research Forum gave an overview of Ireland’s recommendations and roadmap for an Irish National PID Strategy, published in the fall of 2024. Immediate recommended actions include engaging with additional senior leaders across all sectors and maintaining engagement with international PID initiatives, while lessons learned include recruiting lots of willing volunteers to help promote the work and getting buy-in from funding bodies.

Focusing on the Asia-Pacific region

The session Successes and Opportunities for ROR in the Asia-Pacific Region was itself a definite success, and we plan to hold more APAC-focused sessions in APAC-friendly time slots in the future. Even though some clever folks in the Asia-Pacific region have already realized the value of ROR, there’s clearly lots of room to increase awareness and adoption of ROR in the Asia-Pacific region..

First, ROR Technical Community Manager Amanda French gave a brief introduction to ROR. Next, Aaron Ballagh of The Lens (based in Australia) explained how ROR is used to identify organizations in The Lens so that users can find scholarly works from researchers affiliated with a particular organization, then demonstrated an “institutional lineage” search lets a user find all the scholarly works associated with an organization and the organization’s “child” organizations.

Brietta Pike of the publishing arm of Australia’s National Science Agency, CSIRO Publishing, then outlined their “journey to capture and deposit better metadata” by taking steps toward ROR implementation as a “source of truth” for author affiliations. Scott Edmunds of GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, then recounted how the GigaByte Journal is “focused on the Interoperable in FAIR” to make their publications “AI-ready,” and completing the ROR integration for GigaScience’s journals and database is a key part of that.

Finally, Masatsura Igami of NISTEP described why and how they incorporated ROR into the NISTEP Dictionary of Organization names in order to better link this Japanese resource with overseas users. The NISTEP Dictionary “plays a central role in NISTEP’s efforts to compile and publish basic data on the research activities of Japanese universities and public institutions.” The presentation called for improved coverage of Japanese organizations in ROR (which is a priority for 2025) and concluded with a call for ROR to “connect the efforts being made in each country as a network.” A useful idea!

Join us in the coming months

ROR has plenty to keep us busy this year, and you surely do as well. Keep in touch with us by registering for ROR’s upcoming events, by signing up for the quarterly ROR newsletter, by joining the ROR Community Forum to receive more frequent announcements and participate in discussions, or by following ROR on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. Here’s hoping we all thrive in 2025.