Including persistent identifiers (a.k.a. PIDs) in article-level metadata is one of the best ways to improve journal archiving and discovery while promoting interoperability across scholarly communication systems. That’s why Scholastica is so focused on supporting the latest industry-standard PIDs — and this month, we have an exciting announcement! We’ve integrated our peer review system, production service, and OA publishing platform with ROR institutional identifiers.
Scholastica now automatically applies ROR IDs to institutions when authors input them into our peer review submission form and when editors add them to any articles they send to Scholastica’s production service or publish via our OA hosting platform.
How the new ROR integration works
We’ve universally applied ROR support to Scholastica’s peer review system, production service, and OA publishing platform, so there’s no setup required on the part of journals and no additional cost.
We now automatically add ROR IDs for institutional metadata when:
- Authors input institutions into Scholastica’s peer review system submission form (for all authors, not just corresponding authors)
- Editors add institutions to articles before sending them to Scholastica’s production service
- Editors add institutions to Scholastica’s OA publishing platform article creation form
Journals subscribed to multiple Scholastica products (e.g., peer review, production, and OA publishing) can import metadata, including ROR IDs, from one solution to another to save time. We include ROR IDs in all the metadata we produce for journals using our production service and/or OA publishing platform. And we submit ROR IDs to the discovery services Scholastica integrates with, including Crossref and PubMed Central. You can see an example of ROR in Crossref article-level metadata produced by Scholastica here.
Benefits of including ROR IDs in article-level metadata
Scholarly communication infrastructures, including content registration services, indexes, archives, and funder/grant management platforms, use ROR IDs to disambiguate institutional affiliations. Including ROR IDs in metadata supports interoperability across research tools and systems and helps make articles more easily discoverable. In particular, when Digital Object Identifier (DOI) metadata sent to content registration services (e.g., Crossref) includes ROR IDs, the entire scholarly community can leverage that information to automate reporting and gain insight into research outputs at the institutional level.
Speaking to Scholastica’s integration, Project Lead at ROR Maria Gould said, “This is a great example of an end-to-end ROR integration showcasing how journals can collect affiliation details from authors in a standard way and make this information openly available in publication metadata.”
Director of Member and Community Outreach at Crossref Ginny Hendricks added, “Enabling Crossref members to include ROR IDs in their metadata is essential for enriching the scholarly record and building a better research environment. Scholastica is leading the way and will hopefully encourage others to follow.”
Ready to ROR? Learn how you can use ROR and join the community
ROR, which stands for the Research Organization Registry, is the only global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations. It was launched in 2019 by California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite and is independently governed, operated, and financially supported by those organizations.
ROR registry data is CC0 and openly available via a search interface, REST API, and data dump — so individual scholars and academic organizations can freely leverage ROR data to find and link scholarly records by institutional affiliation. Registry updates are released on a rolling basis and curated through a community process that all stakeholders are welcome to take part in. Anyone can join the ROR community to get involved in advisory groups, provide feedback on the future direction of ROR, and integrate ROR into their tools/systems.
You can read more about how various research organizations are integrating with ROR and the benefits in the ROR case studies blog series, including ROR in the COS Open Science Framework and ROR in FAIRsharing.
ROR is now the default identifier supported in Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID metadata. The registry consists of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for over 102,000 organizations to date.
Towards more sustainable scholarly journal publishing
The new ROR integration is part of Scholastica’s efforts to modernize all aspects of publishing in order to enable scholarly organizations of any size to operate high-quality journals as efficiently and affordably as possible. Helping journals collect and generate rich, standards-aligned metadata for articles without technical hassles and import it into discovery services, like Crossref, is integral to that mission.
To learn more about how Scholastica is building out our modular peer review, single-source production, and OA journal hosting software solutions to make publishing more efficient and affordable and facilitate a better research future, visit the Why Scholastica page.
We hope you find this new feature useful! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us — we’re here to help!
