In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a faculty, school, department, institute, centre, lab, or research group — with its own identifier, name, parent and child relationships, type, start and end dates, and links to People, Projects, and Outputs.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A Department of Chemistry as an OrgUnit with parent OrgUnit 'Faculty of Science' and a ROR ID on the top-level University.
Is an instance
A research centre dissolved in 2024 retained as a closed OrgUnit so historical publications continue to be attributable to it.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A building or physical address is not an OrgUnit.
Not an instance
A budget code is not an OrgUnit, though it may be linked to one.

Editorial commentary

Organization units (OrgUnits) capture both the top-level organisation (the university) and its internal structure (departments, labs). CRIS-level OrgUnit modelling distinguishes structural change (re-organisation, mergers, splits) from current state by carrying time-bounded relationships. Linking the top-level OrgUnit to its ROR ID is now standard practice; some CRIS deployments also expose internal OrgUnit identifiers as resolvable URIs through institutional persistent-identifier strategies.

References

euroCRIS, 'CERIF OrgUnit Model'.

Also known as

OrgUnit · Organisational unit

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Organization unit"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit",
  "name": "Organization unit",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit",
  "description": "In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a faculty, school, department, institute, centre, lab, or research group — with its own identifier, name, parent and child relationships, type, start and end dates, and links to People, Projects, and Outputs.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit",
  "sameAs": [
    "OrgUnit",
    "Organisational unit"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:20",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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