Explainer · Plain-language
What is ROR?
ROR (the Research Organization Registry) is a free, open, community-led registry of persistent identifiers for research organisations. A ROR iD uniquely identifies a university, institute, funder, or other research body so its affiliation can be recorded unambiguously across systems.
The step most authors miss
Doing CRediT right? Don’t stop at the statement.
A CRediT statement credits you inside one paper. The recognition CRediT was built for happens when those roles are tied to you, persistently. Sign in with your ORCID — free — and claim your CRediT contributions on casrai.org, the home of the standard. They become a verified, portable part of your identity, not a line that disappears into one PDF.
Free: claim your contributions, then export a journal-ready CRediT statement, schema.org structured data, JATS XML, CSV or BibTeX — and preview your public profile. A membership publishes that profile publicly and verifies the journals you serve.
What ROR identifies
ROR assigns a unique identifier to research-producing and research-funding organisations — universities, research institutes, hospitals, government agencies, companies, and funders. Each record holds the organisation's canonical name, name variants, location, relationships to parent and child organisations, and crosswalks to other identifier schemes.
Why ROR was created
Affiliation strings are notoriously messy — one university can appear under dozens of spellings, abbreviations, and language variants. ROR provides a single stable identifier per organisation so that systems can reliably count, link, and attribute outputs and funding to the correct institution without string-matching guesswork.
Governance and openness
ROR launched in 2019 and is led by a community collaboration of the California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite. The full registry is openly available under a CC0 public-domain dedication, with a public API and regular data dumps — so anyone can integrate ROR without licensing fees.
ROR in the PID ecosystem
ROR is the organisational complement to ORCID (people) and DOI (outputs). It is integrated into Crossref and DataCite metadata, ORCID affiliation records, OpenAlex, and the EU Funding & Tenders Portal — letting affiliation flow through the wider PID graph.
Key facts
At a glance
- Full name: Research Organization Registry
- Launched: 2019
- Identifies: research organisations (universities, institutes, funders)
- Governance: California Digital Library + Crossref + DataCite + community
- Licence: CC0 (public domain) — fully open
- Successor to: GRID (now read-only)
Common misconceptions
What people often get wrong
Often heard: ROR identifies individual researchers.
Actually: No — ROR identifies organisations. ORCID identifies individual researchers; the two are complementary.
Often heard: You have to pay to use ROR.
Actually: No — ROR is free and CC0. The registry, API, and data dumps are openly available at no cost.
Going deeper
