GRID

GRID (Global Research Identifier Database) was a free registry of research organisation identifiers operated by Digital Science, using identifiers of the form grid.NNNNN.X (e.g. grid.5335.0 for the University of Cambridge). Launched in 2015, it became the first widely adopted open identifier scheme for institutions and was embedded in Dimensions, Altmetric, and a wide range of CRIS and repository systems. GRID is retired. It was frozen to new records in 2021 and superseded by ROR (Research Organization Registry), which was seeded from a deduplicated GRID snapshot. This entry documents GRID in the past tense, as a legacy identifier, and focuses on the practical question research offices actually have: what to do with GRID IDs already embedded in existing data.

Why GRID was retired

ROR launched in 2019 as an open, community-governed alternative built by a collaboration of California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science. Digital Science donated the GRID database, under a CC0 licence, as ROR’s initial seed data. In 2021, Digital Science and the ROR community jointly announced that ROR would take over as the field’s leading open organisation identifier, and that GRID would be retired from active curation, with a final public data release in Q4 2021. No new GRID IDs have been minted since. DataCite’s own guidance now tells depositors to use ROR IDs, not GRID IDs, in the affiliationIdentifier and funderIdentifier metadata properties.

The GRID → ROR crosswalk

Because ROR was built directly from GRID’s data, every legacy GRID identifier that had a corresponding organisation at ROR’s 2019 launch has a mapped ROR ID, and ROR records carry the original GRID identifier as an external identifier. In practice this means:

• A ROR record can be looked up starting from either its own ROR ID or its legacy GRID ID.
• Systems that only stored a GRID ID (an older CRIS export, a pre-2021 Dimensions extract, a legacy affiliation table) can resolve the equivalent current ROR ID via that crosswalk rather than needing to re-match the institution from scratch.
• The crosswalk is one-directional in practical terms going forward: ROR is the actively maintained registry (new institutions, mergers, renames, and corrections are only reflected in ROR), so a GRID ID should be treated as a fixed historical reference, not a live identifier to keep depositing.

See the ‘ROR ID‘ entry for how the current identifier is structured and governed, and the ‘ROR vs GRID comparison‘ for a side-by-side of what changed.

What happens to legacy GRID IDs already in your metadata

Nothing needs to be deleted. A GRID ID sitting in an existing CRIS record, publication metadata export, or funder report is not invalid data — it is historical data pointing at an organisation that, in almost all cases, now also has a ROR ID. The practical migration work for a research office is:

• When updating metadata templates, deposit workflows, or CRIS integrations, switch the field to capture ROR IDs going forward rather than GRID IDs.
• When reconciling older records against current systems, use the GRID→ROR crosswalk (available through the ROR API and data dumps) to translate rather than re-identifying institutions manually.
• Do not expect new institutions, especially ones founded or renamed after 2021, to have a GRID ID at all — only ROR will have them.

Where GRID still shows up

Because GRID was embedded so widely before 2021, its identifiers persist in older Dimensions and Altmetric data, some CRIS systems that have not migrated their affiliation fields, and historical bibliometric datasets. A research office is most likely to encounter grid.NNNNN.X values when working with legacy exports or long-running institutional datasets rather than in any current deposit workflow — current funder, publisher, and repository systems now expect a ‘curated ROR org record‘.

Related identifiers

• ‘ROR ID‘ — the current, actively governed successor identifier.
• ‘Curated org record (ROR)‘ — what a live ROR record contains.
• ‘Identifier crosswalk‘ — the general concept of mapping between identifier schemes for the same entity.
• ‘PIDs & CRIS pillar‘ — the broader persistent-identifier landscape this fits into.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still register a new GRID ID? No. GRID stopped issuing new identifiers in 2021; any new organisation should be looked up or requested in ROR instead.

Is grid.ac still online? Digital Science retired GRID from active public service after its final 2021 data release; ROR is the maintained registry going forward.

Do I need to update every historical record that uses a GRID ID? Not necessarily. Historical GRID IDs remain resolvable via the ROR crosswalk. Prioritise updating active metadata templates and deposit workflows to use ROR IDs; bulk-converting a large historical archive is optional and depends on whether downstream systems need live ROR data (aliases, mergers, corrections) attached.

References

• Digital Science / ROR, ‘ROR and GRID: The Way Forward’ (ror.org/blog/2021-07-12-ror-grid-the-way-forward/), 2021.
• DataCite Support, ‘What organization identifier should I use for affiliations?’ (support.datacite.org).
• Lammey R. et al., ‘Research Organization Registry (ROR): A New Open Identifier for Research Organizations’ (ror.org).