The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations. ROR makes it easy for anyone or any system to disambiguate institution names and connect research organizations to researchers and research outputs.

Organizations are not static entities. They change their names, merge, split, shut down, and re-emerge, and this makes it difficult to connect research organizations to research outputs and researchers. A persistent identifier for research organizations makes this easier.

ROR is the first and only organization identifier that is openly available (CC0 data available via an open REST API and public data dump), specifically focused on identifying affiliations in scholarly metadata, developed as a community initiative to meet community use cases, and designed to be integrated into open scholarly infrastructure. It is the default identifier supported in Crossref DOI metadata, DataCite DOI metadata, and ORCID.

ROR is used in journal publishing systems, data repositories, funder and grant management platforms, open access workflows, and other research infrastructure components to disambiguate institutional affiliations, improve discovery and tracking of research outputs by affiliation, and facilitate OA publishing workflows, among other use cases.