Enrich HAL’s repository of authors’ affiliations thanks to the ROR international identifier

HALSubscribe

Written by CCSD

It is now possible to use ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifiers when completing metadata related to research organizations whose data is stored in HAL’s dedicated repository. This will contribute in the long run to the improvement of automatic affiliation of authors that can be applied when you complete a submission form.

You surely already know the DOI for scholarly publications or research data, as well as the ORCID and idHAL for researchers. These identifiers enable interconnections and facilitate data exchange between platforms, databases and applications. Likewise, it is essential for organisations and institutions to have identifiers. HAL already uses the idRef (produced by the ABES), the RNSR (National Directory of the Research Structures produced by the Research Ministry), as well as the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier). The ROR, which is an international identifier, is now added to this list.

As with the other identifiers, it can be added manually by authorized users (portal administrators and structure referents) to any entry in the repository of research structures.

The ROR in the metadata associated with the DOI

The clear advantage of this identifier is that the main agency managing DOIs announced this summer that they were adding the possibility to retrieve affiliation information via ROR identifiers. This means that a journal publisher, when providing an information associated with an article’s DOI (author, title, journal title, etc.), can add a ROR identifier. This opens up new possibilities for applications that extract metadata, such as HAL. If a ROR identifier, present in metadata related to a DOI, matches with another one already existing in the repository data, this makes it possible to consolidate the affiliation information of an author automatically proposed during the deposit.

To date, 3,759 French research organisations are listed in the ROR. As the data in HAL listings is aligned with the one provided by the ISNI Registry Agency, a first test identified 550 structures in the HAL listings. These information will soon be complemented thanks to the ROR identifier.

Who is behind the ROR?

ROR is an open infrastructure launched in 2019 to gather basic metadata about research organisations, each attributed with unique identifiers. It is managed by a group of organisations (California Digital Library, Crossref and DataCite) in collaboration with a network of publishers, libraries and foundations.

ROR is intended for use by the research community, namely to increase the use of organisation identifiers and to enable interconnection between various systems. The implementation of ROR identifiers in research infrastructures and metadata will enable more efficient discovery and tracking of research outputs across institutions and funding bodies.

With the ORCID and now ROR identifiers, HAL strengthens its insertion in an international infrastructure network dedicated to the open science movement and contributes to the outreach of French research.