October 24, 2019

Altum contributes to the Research Organization Registry

Altum committed today to helping fund the Research Organization Registry – a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. Maria Gould, product manager at California Digital Library and ROR project said, “ROR is grateful for the support received from Altum, which will enable us to further develop and sustain the registry in line with community needs.”

All of ROR’s work so far has been completed through in-kind donations from ROR steering organizations. Steve Pinchotti, Altum’s CEO, says, “ROR is a critical component of a connected research data landscape. As a software company focused on the advancement of research, Altum recognizes our responsibility to financially support and sustain the key research infrastructure initiatives like ORCID and ROR that enable open science and open global identifiers for research outputs, research contributors, and research institutions.”

The promise of ROR lies in connecting identifiers throughout the scholarly communication landscape. ROR IDs are being captured in systems and platforms where researcher affiliations are collected, and will be supported in Crossref and DataCite metadata to enable discovery and tracking of research outputs across institutions and funding bodies. “ROR IDs are already integrated into the 26,000 institution profiles of Altum’s ProposalCentral research grants management platform,” notes Mr. Pinchotti.

“ROR is grateful for the support received from Altum, which will enable us to further develop and sustain the registry in line with community needs.”

Maria Gould

California Digital Library and ROR project

The Research Organization Registry ROR is a robust and stable registry of identifiers for close to 100,000 organizations, and provides open tools for using and implementing ROR IDs, including a front-end search interface, an API, a reconciler that works with OpenRefine, and a public data dump. Everything is openly available on Github. ROR emerged to fill a crucial gap in the scholarly communication landscape: while we already had an open network of identifiers for research outputs (DOIs for publications and data) and research contributors (ORCID IDs), open infrastructure for research organizations was a missing piece.

Altum is a software company driven towards the advancement of research. Our ProposalCentral online grant application tracking administration software is designed to empower funders, connect the research community, and extend the impact of grant-making long beyond the award. ProposalCentral brings users into a vast ecosystem of data, people, research institutions, and projects immediately. It takes a universe of information, gives it structure, and makes it accessible.