ROR IDs should not be required for affiliations

[amandafrench]

I'm the Technical Community Manager for ROR, the Research Organization Registry. Someone who is trying to submit an abstract to Jacow through Indico whose affiliated organization is not in ROR has written us to ask that their organization be added. We're happy to process this request, of course, but our current average review time is 4-6 weeks, and we wouldn't want them to have to wait through that delay before submitting!

We strongly discourage systems from requiring entry of institutions from ROR for this reason -- see our documentation on how to use ROR in forms at https://ror.readme.io/docs/forms#allow-entering-a-text-string-if-no-ror-match-is-found

Does the Indico plugin for Jacow require the entry of an organization from ROR, or is this user mistaken that their organization must be in ROR before they can complete their abstract submission? They shared the following image:

If the plugin does not currently require that an organization be in ROR, I'd recommend removing the above prompt altogether. From the issue at indico/indico#6337 it seems like your developers are aware that the ROR ID should not be required.

Glad to learn more about Indico, though! Seems like a very nice system. ROR is also heavily integrated into InvenioRDM, by the way, so you might confer with them about ROR implementation. Here's a recent blog post about that: https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/simplified-ror-affiliation-metadata-handling/

[amandafrench]

ping @adambuttrick

[ThiefMaster]

cc @t4nec0

[ThiefMaster]

Yes, in the future we hope to integrate ROR properly in Indico :) Currently the JACoW instance simply does a semi-manual import every once in a while.

And yes, right now only ROR affiliations can be selected there, but we also realized internally in the end that we probably need to provide some way for people to register their own affiliation in case it's not in ROR or something not suitable for ROR in order to use it...

[amandafrench]

Thanks for the quick reply, @ThiefMaster! Sounds good. Happy to help if need be.

[ThiefMaster]

BTW while I have someone from ROR here in this thread: Do I understand it correctly that also any company can register itself in ROR? (for example, I find Microsoft in there, which is clearly not a research org)

Because if yes, I think we could come up with some solution where we ask people to submit a request to ROR and then reference e.g. the related GitHub issue when adding the affiliation (temporarily) to Indico... this would probably even allow for some automation later on to link it to the proper ROR entry once it's been created (without manually trying to match affiliation names).

Alternatively I think we could still let users create their own affiliation (just not freetext but with some extra metadata like we do with the ROR ones), and just encourage them to add it to ROR but not force them to do so.

[amandafrench]

Well, any company can ask to be registered in ROR, yes, and our curators carefully review each request before deciding whether to create a ROR record for it. We refuse requests fairly often.

The main thing we look for is whether the organization is cited as an author affiliation or as a funder in published research. Microsoft and other commercial companies actually do (and fund) tons of research -- Microsoft has an entire unit called "Microsoft Research" that does a lot of work in computing. See https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=authorships.institutions.lineage%3Ai1290206253

I don't think the solution you mention in which you reference the GitHub issue for the request at https://ror-community/ror-updates/issues would really work. For one thing, we don't assign the ROR ID for approved requests until very late in the review process, just before we do the batch update of the whole registry.

One thing we'd be happy to do is to grab a spreadsheet of "missing" organizations from you and process those as a batch. That isn't an automated process, though. Those bulk request sheets are at https://ror.org/registry/#bulk-requests

[ThiefMaster]

One thing we'd be happy to do is to grab a spreadsheet of "missing" organizations from you and process those as a batch. That isn't an automated process, though. Those bulk request sheets are at https://ror.org/registry/#bulk-requests

That sounds interesting, I think it wouldn't be too hard to have a quick way to export non-ROR-linked affiliations on our side, and then someone from JACoW could send you the spreadsheet e.g. after the submission period for a major conference ended. It asks for more data than we typically store in Indico though, so it would certainly require some manual digging between extracting data data from Indico and adding it to the spreadsheet.

[amandafrench]

Also, though I don't think anyone else is doing this, you could probably leave out the spreadsheet step and build something to create a batch of requests on our updates GitHub repo at https://github.com/ror-community/ror-updates/issues since we accept direct GitHub issues as requests as well, which can be a lot faster from the requestor side than the form or the spreadsheets.

[adrianarossi67]

Hello Amanda, and thank you for bringing to our attention this problem. My name is Adriana Rossi and I am at present the JACoW chair. JACoW is a collaboration that supports the Accelerator Conferences organisation and publishes proceedings (see https://www.jacow.org/Main/Proceedings). We allow people to register from new institutes or universities, but we need the official ROR identification when we publish, so that the affiliation on the paper corresponds to the one issued by ROR.
From registration to publication there may be less than 4-6 weeks (it depends on the conference).

So to answer your comment: If the plugin does not currently require that an organization be in ROR, I'd recommend removing the above prompt altogether. From the issue at indico/indico#6337 it seems like your developers are aware that the ROR ID should not be required. I would say that the message should be left.

BUT if there are guidelines to extract at least the name that ROR will attribute to the institute (or is it the institute that choses it?). For the ID this can come later. Thank you so much! Adriana