Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A ROR record for Inserm including all aliases (French and English), parent organisation, child research units, and Crossref Funder ID crosswalk.
- Is an instance
A ROR record updated to reflect a renaming, while keeping the original ROR ID.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A scraped table of universities from a Wikipedia category is not a curated ROR record.
- Not an instance
A vendor's proprietary affiliation taxonomy is not a curated ROR record.
Editorial commentary
A curated organisation record is an entry in the Research Organization Registry (ROR) that has been reviewed and approved by ROR's curation team against the registry's published inclusion criteria, rather than an automatically generated or self-submitted-but-unverified entry. A curated record carries a stable ROR identifier plus structured metadata: the organisation's names (including aliases and labels in multiple languages), its type, country and geographic location, and its relationships to other organisations — parent, child, related, predecessor, and successor — along with crosswalks to other identifier systems such as the Crossref Funder Registry, ISNI, GRID, and Wikidata.
Identifier stability separated from metadata mutability
The defining design feature of a curated ROR record is that the two things a user might want from it — a stable identifier to cite, and accurate current metadata — are handled separately. The ROR ID itself is never reissued or reused, even when an organisation is renamed, restructured, split, or merges with another; the record's metadata is instead updated in place to reflect that change, with the history of predecessor/successor relationships preserved in the record rather than discarded. This means a citation or affiliation tagged with a ROR ID from years ago continues to resolve to the correct organisation’s current record, rather than becoming a dead reference the way a plain organisation-name string would when that organisation is renamed.
What is not a curated ROR record
An ad hoc list of institutions scraped from a Wikipedia category, or a vendor’s own proprietary affiliation taxonomy, is not a curated ROR record even if it happens to be accurate at a point in time — it has not gone through ROR's curation and inclusion process, carries no ROR ID, and will not be maintained against the same stability guarantee. ROR moved its API and schema to version 2.0 in production in April 2024, consolidating what were previously separate name fields (name, aliases, labels, acronyms) into a single typed names array and restructuring how external identifiers and locations are represented; v1 of the API and schema was fully retired in December 2025.
References
- ROR, 'ROR Data Schema' and 'ROR Curation Policy' (ror.org).
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Curated org record (ROR)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/curated-org-record-ror" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/curated-org-record-ror",
"name": "Curated org record (ROR)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/curated-org-record-ror",
"description": "An entry in the ROR registry that has been reviewed and approved by ROR curators against the published inclusion criteria, carrying a stable ROR ID and metadata including names, types, country, geographic location, parent/child/related/successor/predecessor relationships, and crosswalks.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/curated-org-record-ror",
"sameAs": [],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:11:44",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:41:44",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
