Recommendation M2.2

Recommendation to Helmholtz data stewards, repository maintainers and developers to implement ROR as a reference to organizations in technical infrastructures

Description

[Status: Under development, Date: , Version: 001]

Motivation for this Recommendation:

Implementing ROR in metadata workflows helps data stewards, repository maintainers, and developers ensure cleaner, more consistent, and machine-actionable organizational references. It eliminates ambiguity caused by name variants, manual entry errors, and institutional restructuring, reducing the curation burden and improving data quality at scale. For maintainers and developers, integrating ROR enables easier linking and interoperability with external systems (e.g., ORCID, DataCite, Crossref), supports automated harvesting and reporting, and simplifies downstream integration with analytics and discovery services. Using ROR as the authoritative source ensures that organizational metadata stays up to date without requiring manual oversight. Moreover, contributing to the accuracy of ROR records fosters a more reliable global research infrastructure ecosystem—benefiting the entire community and reducing duplicated efforts across systems.

Recommendation

It is recommended that data infrastructures (data repositories, data bases) should:

record a ROR with any organization registered in conjunction with the metadata of datasets, publications, instruments and alike where possible and make this data part of the datasets available for harvesting.

treat ROR metadata as the primary source of truth and update their own metadata accordingly.

Optionally inform the respective organizations if they think the metadata registered with the ROR is not accurate.

Binding Convention:

mandatory	conditional	optional
Helmholtz FAIR Principle

Precondition for Implementation:

Related Recommendations

Parent:

Dependent:

Other: none

Contributors

Manu

Content

1. Explanation of the Background and Benefits of the Recommendation

About

History and structure

Current Use of …

Motivation

Implementing ROR in metadata workflows helps data stewards, repository maintainers, and developers ensure cleaner, more consistent, and machine-actionable organizational references. It eliminates ambiguity caused by name variants, manual entry errors, and institutional restructuring, reducing the curation burden and improving data quality at scale. For maintainers and developers, integrating ROR enables easier linking and interoperability with external systems (e.g., ORCID, DataCite, Crossref), supports automated harvesting and reporting, and simplifies downstream integration with analytics and discovery services. Using ROR as the authoritative source ensures that organizational metadata stays up to date without requiring manual oversight. Moreover, contributing to the accuracy of ROR records fosters a more reliable global research infrastructure ecosystem—benefiting the entire community and reducing duplicated efforts across systems.

2. Possible alternative solutions

3. Consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of implementing the recommendation

(quality of content, limitations, interoperability, sustainability: expected future dissemination / technical availability / funding)

4. The Recommendation

It is recommended that data infrastructures (data repositories, data bases) should:

record a ROR with any organization registered in conjunction with the metadata of datasets, publications, instruments and alike where possible.

treat ROR metadata as the primary source of truth and update their own metadata accordingly.

Optionally inform the respective organizations if they think the metadata registered with the ROR is not accurate.

5. Naming of communities that have already implemented the recommendation

6. Documentation of the test to validate correct implementation

7. Examples of Instances

8. Further Information

References

Relevant Community Recommendations

9. History of this document