ROR ID: Organisation Identifier

ROR ID

A persistent identifier for research organisations issued by the Research Organization Registry (ROR), expressed as an HTTPS URI of the form https://ror.org/0xxxxxxxx where the final nine-character path component is a base32-encoded random value with a check digit.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 22 Aug 2026

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ROR (Research Organization Registry) is a free, community-led registry of research organisations, launched in 2019 by a collaboration of California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science — which donated its GRID database, under CC0, as ROR’s initial data. Each ROR record carries the organisation’s canonical name, aliases, labels in multiple languages, country, geographic coordinates, organisation type, parent/child/related relationships, and crosswalks to other identifier schemes (the retired GRID identifier, ISNI, Wikidata, and the Crossref Funder Registry ID where applicable). A ROR ID itself is an opaque, non-parseable HTTPS URI, e.g. https://ror.org/02jx3x895.

What problem ROR solves

Before ROR, “which organisation authored this?” had no single answer researchers, funders, and publishers all trusted — institutions were represented as free-text affiliation strings, prone to spelling variants, translations, mergers, and ambiguity (is “Cambridge” the university or the city, in Massachusetts or England?). ROR gives every metadata system a single, openly governed, non-proprietary identifier to point at instead, the way a DOI disambiguates a publication or an ORCID iD disambiguates a person.

How a research office encounters ROR

Funders (including many in Europe and increasingly the US) require or recommend ROR IDs for institutional affiliation in grant applications and reporting.
Crossref and DataCite metadata deposits now carry ROR IDs for author and funder affiliations, meaning ROR IDs propagate automatically into publication and dataset records once a publisher or repository supports the field.
CRIS platforms (Pure, Elements, Converis) use ROR to disambiguate collaborating institutions and sub-units in co-authorship and partnership data.
A research office reconciling an older dataset that only has legacy GRID identifiers needs the GRID→ROR crosswalk to bring that data into current systems — see ‘GRID‘.

Governance and schema

ROR is openly governed by a community with Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library on its Steering Committee, and its data is released under CC0. ROR’s schema and API went through a major v1-to-v2 migration completed in December 2025: v2 consolidated four separate name fields into a single typed names array, replaced a sparsely populated addresses field with a simpler locations array, and restructured external identifiers (GRID, ISNI, Wikidata) into typed objects rather than named fields. Anyone integrating with the ROR API directly should confirm they are on schema v2, since v1 requests now return an HTTP error.

How it relates to other identifiers in this cluster

‘GRID‘ — the retired identifier ROR’s registry was seeded from; ROR is its actively maintained successor.
‘Curated org record (ROR)‘ — what a full ROR record contains beyond the bare identifier.
‘Crossref DOI‘ and ‘DataCite DOI‘ — the two publication/data identifier schemes whose metadata now routinely embeds ROR IDs for affiliation and funder fields.
See also the ‘ROR vs GRID comparison‘ and the ‘PIDs & CRIS pillar‘ for the broader identifier landscape.

Frequently asked questions

Is a ROR ID the same as an ISNI? No — ISNI is a broader, ISO-standardised identifier covering all kinds of public identities (including organisations outside research); ROR is scoped specifically to research-performing and research-funding organisations and is free and CC0-licensed, whereas ISNI carries its own separate registration process.

How do I find or request a ROR ID for my institution? Search the existing registry at ror.org first; if the organisation is missing, ROR accepts new-organisation requests through its public curation process.

Do sub-units (departments, institutes, hospitals within a university system) get their own ROR IDs? Increasingly yes, where there is a clear, stable, citable sub-organisation with its own outputs — ROR records support parent/child relationships so a department can have its own ID while remaining linked to its parent institution.

References

Lammey R. et al., ‘Research Organization Registry (ROR): A New Open Identifier for Research Organizations’ (ror.org).
Cruse P., Haak L., Pentz E., ‘A community approach to open infrastructure: organization identifiers’ (2019 white paper).
ROR, ‘Version 1 of the ROR API and schema is sunsetting’ changelog (ror.readme.io), and ‘ROR and GRID: The Way Forward’ (ror.org/blog/2021-07-12-ror-grid-the-way-forward/).

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="ROR ID"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ror-id" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ror-id",
  "name": "ROR ID",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ror-id",
  "description": "A persistent identifier for research organisations issued by the Research Organization Registry (ROR), expressed as an HTTPS URI of the form https://ror.org/0xxxxxxxx where the final nine-character path component is a base32-encoded random value with a check digit.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ror-id",
  "sameAs": [
    "Research Organization Registry identifier"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-08-22T12:12:39",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}