Balancing the Global and the Local at the Research Organization Registry (ROR)

When members of the Research Organization Registry (ROR) and Zenodo teams gave a workshop on ROR at Open Repositories in Stellenbosch in South Africa in 2023, more than one attendee mentioned that it would be useful if ROR's organizations could be grouped by continent as well as by country to enable easier tracking of research associated with African research organizations and funders. The ROR team put this helpful suggestion on the ROR roadmap and then implemented it with the release of ROR metadata schema version 2.1: every one of the 110,000+ records for research organizations in ROR now includes information indicating the continent where that organization is located. In this presentation, we will share similar stories of how ROR works to serve a global community of research organizations and scholarly systems with diverse uses, needs, languages, alphabets, systems, organization structures, and regional identifiers through efforts to ensure global equity in ROR's data, definitions, technology, and operations. With records for research organizations from 228 countries and research organization names in 128 languages, ROR already strives to be a truly global registry, but we know we can always do more, and we look to Open Repositories for help.