The Flemish Organization Registry (FOR). A Globally Connected Infrastructure to Identify the Full Spectrum of Organizations Involved in Research and Innovation

Abstract Purpose Organizations are major actors in multiple dimensions of the research landscape. Subsequently, accurate organization identification is a prerequisite for precise studies about, for example, collaboration in publication practice or project participation. Global reference databases are essential instruments in this context, but recent experience in Flanders showed that ROR (the worldwide Research Organization Registry) does not contain a sufficient set of records to code the full spectrum of organizations involved in research and innovation. This raises an important question: how can we structurally map all relevant science and technology actors in analysis and studies of different aspects of the research and innovation landscape? We elaborate how this question is being addressed in Flanders through the development of the Flemish Organization Registry (FOR). Design/methodology/approach FOR, as a local expansion of ROR, provides unique identifiers for all additional organizations that appear in author affiliation datasets or project participant files. We describe the source data, the consolidation, the addition of metadata and the relation to the international reference database. Findings We find, through a case study, that the use of FOR delivers structured, fine-grained information about a full set of organizations in multiple dimensions of science in a Flemish context. Research limitations The paper introduces FOR as a proof of concept and discusses one case study only. Practical implications FOR and similar regionally anchored infrastructures can be deployed as tools to enrich data when analyzing a national research context organization-wise. Originality The article presents a national extension of ROR as an example of a way to map all actors in a national research system.