Infrastructure and the Research Organization Registry
Infrastructure and the Research Organization Registry
July 2022
Amanda French, Technical Community Manager
While characterized as a quick, five-minute read, Amanda French, Technical Community Manager, Research Organization Registry, recently provided an excellent essay on the topic of infrastructure to the Crossref blog. This quote provides a good flavor.
Scholarship is a network of networks, and common identifiers like DOIs and ORCIDs enable the interchange of information in those networks about scholarly outputs and scholars, and thus they enable scholarship itself. What could be more important than that?
But the organizations that employ, fund, and publish scholarly researchers have had a hard time keeping track of everything “their” researchers have given to the world. That’s the problem that ROR, “a community-led registry of open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifiers for every research organization in the world,” can help solve. In an ideal world, universities might use ROR IDs to track the research their faculty have produced, certainly, but they might also discover which universities their faculty’s co-authors most often come from.