Research Organization Registry (ROR), responsible for the PID of the same name used for the identification of organizations, has officially launched the version 2 of the ROR schema and API on April 15. The version 2 of ROR, developed and beta-tested over many months with the generous input and help of the ROR community, is more streamlined and more powerful than version 1, including some restructuring that will make ROR data easier to manage and use and some new fields that ROR users have been asking for.
An additional organization type, “funder,” which can be combined with existing organization types in ROR, such as “nonprofit” and “government,” was added. With ROR set to become the standard identifier for funders, this change will make it easier for ROR users to recognize and select funding organizations. By adding a place to store language codes for all name variants and treating names in different languages as equivalent, the new version has made ROR metadata less Anglocentric and more useful for countries with multiple official languages. Not all new fields and subfields in version 2 of ROR have values yet, but it is expected, that most or all of this information will be added by the end of Q2 2024, proceeding carefully in order to ensure that added values are accurate.
The ROR API now exists in two parallel versions. All the same records will always be available at the same time in both versions of the API, and all the same functionality of version 1 of the ROR API remains available in version 2. Users of version 2 of the ROR API, however, will be able to send additional queries based on version 2 metadata, such as queries based on created and last modified dates. Version 1 of the ROR API will remain the default for at least another year, through April 2025 and perhaps beyond.
If you’d like to know more details about all the changes in version 2 of the ROR API and schema, take a look at the relevant ROR blog post below or the changelog and the ROR v2 documentation.