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

[Status: Under development, Date: 2025/05/26 09:28, Version: 001]

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.

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

1. 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.
2. treat ROR metadata as the primary source of truth and update their own metadata accordingly.
3. Optionally inform the respective organizations if they think the metadata registered with the ROR is not accurate.

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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.

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

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

1. record a ROR with any organization registered in conjunction with the metadata of datasets, publications, instruments and alike where possible.
2. treat ROR metadata as the primary source of truth and update their own metadata accordingly.
3. Optionally inform the respective organizations if they think the metadata registered with the ROR is not accurate.