Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Department of Chemistry as an OrgUnit with parent OrgUnit 'Faculty of Science' and a ROR ID on the top-level University.
- Is an instance
A research centre dissolved in 2024 retained as a closed OrgUnit so historical publications continue to be attributable to it.
- Is an instance
A university renamed after a merger, where the OrgUnit record is updated and the ROR ID re-pointed to the successor entity rather than a new record being created.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A building or physical address is not an OrgUnit.
- Not an instance
A budget code is not an OrgUnit, though it may be linked to one.
Editorial commentary
An Organization Unit (OrgUnit) is a CRIS entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a university, faculty, school, department, institute, research centre, or lab — with its own identifier, name, type, parent/child relationships to other org units, start and end dates, and links to the People, Projects, and Outputs associated with it.
Modelling hierarchy and change over time
OrgUnits capture both the top-level organisation and its internal structure as a hierarchy of parent/child relationships. CRIS-level OrgUnit modelling distinguishes genuine structural change — a re-organisation, a merger, a department split — from a simple attribute update, by carrying its own time-bounded relationships rather than overwriting a flat ‘department’ field. A dissolved research centre is typically retained as a closed OrgUnit rather than deleted, so historical publications remain correctly attributable to it.
Disambiguation: linking the top-level unit to a ROR ID
Linking the top-level OrgUnit — the institution itself — to its ROR ID is now standard practice across CRIS deployments, giving the institution a disambiguated, resolvable identifier usable outside the local system. Internal sub-units (departments, labs) generally do not have their own ROR records — ROR is scoped to institutional-level organisations — though some CRIS deployments expose internal sub-unit identifiers as resolvable URIs through their own institutional persistent-identifier strategy.
How this differs from its closest CRIS siblings
An Organization Unit is the org-side entity itself, distinct from Affiliation (CRIS), which is the separate, time-bounded link between a Person and an OrgUnit — the OrgUnit exists whether or not any specific person is currently affiliated with it. It is also distinct from a curated org record in ROR: ROR’s curated record is an external registry entry maintained outside any single CRIS, supplying the disambiguated identifier and canonical metadata (name variants, country, type, relationships to other organisations) that a CRIS’s internal OrgUnit record can reference — the ROR record does not itself track internal departmental structure or local affiliations.
Frequently asked questions
Does every OrgUnit need its own persistent identifier?
The top-level institutional OrgUnit should be linked to a ROR ID; internal sub-units are usually only identified within the local CRIS unless the institution has built its own resolvable-URI scheme for them.
What happens to publications linked to a department that no longer exists?
The department’s OrgUnit record is typically closed, given an end date, rather than deleted, so existing output attributions remain valid and queryable.
References
Also known as
OrgUnit · Organisational unit
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Organization unit"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit",
"name": "Organization unit",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit",
"description": "In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a faculty, school, department, institute, centre, lab, or research group — with its own identifier, name, parent and child relationships, type, start and end dates, and links to People, Projects, and Outputs.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/organization-unit",
"sameAs": [
"OrgUnit",
"Organisational unit"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:15:20",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:52:36",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
