PID for faculties. Does anyone have an experience/solution?

[Eva Karbanová]

Dear colleagues,

Is there anyone who has the experience with identification of faculties (and other university subunits) within repositories? As ROR isn't the option because faculties are out of the ROR's scope, our team is looking for some other effective solution. The reason is that in our country there is research evaluation  focused strongly on faculties, more than on mother organisations.

Thank you in advance for any insight/experience!

Eva Karbanová

National Library of Technology

Czech Republic, Prague

[Arthur Smith]

Hi Eva,

  there was a project to work on how to implement departmental/faculty/other subunit extensions to ROR a few years ago; I have access to a conclusion document but I don't think it was ever published. The summary was as follows:

ROR should extend the identifier scheme to allow organizations to describe their own internal structure. We see three options for this support:

1. ROR could defer to another entity or entities to handle extended identifiers

2. ROR could follow ARK’s qualifier format with each institution having its own resolver for their extended identifiers

3. ROR could provide a full central resolution service for extended identifiers

but I have not heard from this group in several years and I don't know if there is any current effort to continue pursuing this. Maybe others on this list have more info?

   Arthur Smith (American Physical Society)

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[Siobhann McCafferty]

Hi Eva,

I can help. 

Facilities are within the remit of ROR and in Australia we use them. 

The ARDC is currently developing some guidelines about this Im happy to send you some examples and more info about our recommendations if that is useful?

Best,

- Siobhann 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/ror.org/d/msgid/ror-community/2dca9cc4-f2ba-48a7-9c50-4c0a9915fae6%40aps.org.

[Siobhann McCafferty]

Hey folks, 

I've mis-read faculty as facility! 

Still happy to share our recommendations on facilities though and it could extend to faculty in some cases. 

Best,

- Siobhann 

On Tue, 6 Jan 2026 at 09:44, Koshoffer, Amy (koshofae) <KOSH...@ucmail.uc.edu> wrote:

Siobhann,

Would you be willing to share the guidelines and examples with the list?  This would be helpful and much appreciated.

Amy Koshoffer

Get Outlook for iOS

---

From: 'Siobhann McCafferty' via ROR Community Forum <ror-co...@ror.org>
Sent: Monday, January 5, 2026 6:27:39 PM
To: Arthur Smith <aps...@aps.org>
Cc: ror-co...@ror.org <ror-co...@ror.org>
Subject: Re: [ror-community] PID for faculties. Does anyone have an experience/solution?

 

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[Cátia Laranjeira]

Dear Eva,

 

Thank you for raising this question.

 

In Portugal, we face a similar challenge. We also have a set of use cases that depend on the unambiguous identification of faculties, particularly because research evaluation is often focused at the faculty level rather than solely at the parent organization.

 

We have shared with the ROR team how essential unique identifiers for faculties are in our context, and how the fact that ROR does not currently support these entities limits our ability to fully adopt the standard for all our use cases.

 

For the time being, we continue to rely on our ISNI+ system, which combines ISNI and Ringgold identifiers, as a solution to address this need.

 

Best,

 

Cátia Laranjeira Gestora do PTCRIS, Área do Conhecimento Científico Manager of PTCRIS, Scientific Knowledge Area
CIÊNCIAVITAE: https://www.cienciavitae.pt/3415-1354-5489
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3952-8294
	Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia FCCN, serviços digitais da FCT Av. do Brasil, 101, 1700-066 Lisboa, Portugal T: [+351] 218 440 100 | fccn.pt

 

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[Jennifer Devine - NOAA Affiliate]

Hi Ava,

We frequently encounter a similar challenge to yours. Our structure includes a parent organization, line office programs, support offices, centers, regional offices, and subunits. We also frequently have joint programs with Universities and other agencies, which are difficult to structure. 

Our current structure within the agency is:

Parent Agency

Agency

Line Office

Program Office/Lab

Division

and can include additional affiliations.

We are part of the US Government ORCID Consortium and we use the ORCID Member Portal to help manage our agencies staff with authorized authorities in ORCID. With this approach, we collaborated with ROR's scope to establish a three-tiered hierarchy within ROR: 

Agency

Line Office

Program Office/Lab

ORCID has Organization ID Sources for ROR, GRID and Ringgold. We do not use GRID as it no longer exists (we do have a subscription to Dimensions which includes the GRID ID and external IDs including Wikidata. ROR, ISNI and Crossref). ORCID is working on updating their scheme to switch over all GRID IDs to ROR's. We do not have a subscription with Ringgold and while some of our affiliations do have Ringgold IDs we are unable to manage them without a subscription and most of the metadata is outdated. Therefore we use ROR IDs. Additional affiliations usually does not meet the scope requirements to have a ROR.

Currently, if a ROR is unable to be established we can add it the department field in ORCID, but the Organization field with an Organization ID is required. ORCID users can add their own affiliations as well, but we are unable to authorize them if no ROR exists or it lies outside the Department field.

For our DOI metadata (we use DataCite) we can use ROR, ISNI, Crossref Funder ID, Wikidata, or VIAF. If any of theses IDs are established then we chose from this order ISNI's being the secondary PID we would use.

 

We have been collecting use cases to show our structuring to help provide additional structuring outside of RORs to help present and represent the need for RORs/PIDs for our additional entities.

Example: 

United States Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, Office of Water Prediction, Office of Hydrologic Development 

US DOC/NOAA/NWS/OWP/OHD

United States Department of Commerce - https://ror.org/04chq2495

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - https://ror.org/02z5nhe81

NOAA National Weather Service - https://ror.org/00tgqzw13

NOAA Office of Water Prediction - https://ror.org/013ew2c19

NOAA Office of Hydrologic Development - n/a

ISNI 0000000446590309

Hope this helps!

Best,

Jen

[João Pereira]

Hi Eva,

In the University of Porto we had the same problem so we use the ISNI ID to identify our faculties and ROR to identify our University in our Thesis publications. Ex https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/68409?mode=full

Note: our faculties (a total of 15 organisational units dedicated to teaching and research) have scientific, educational, administrative and financial autonomy. See https://www.up.pt/portal/en/explore/organisation/administration-and-operations/ and https://sigarra.up.pt/up/en/web_base.gera_pagina?p_pagina=2310

Despite our efforts to explain the nature of our faculties, ROR denied the criation of ROR IDs to our faculties.

Best regards and a Happy 2026!

João Pereira

Técnico Superior / Senior Technician

Serviço de Gestão de Documentação e Informação  / Documentation and Information Management Service

(+351) 220 408 147

www.up.pt/ updigital     |      documentaca...@uporto.pt     |     (+351) 220 408 888

[Koshoffer, Amy (koshofae)]

Siobhann,

Would you be willing to share the guidelines and examples with the list?  This would be helpful and much appreciated.

Amy Koshoffer

Get Outlook for iOS

---

From: 'Siobhann McCafferty' via ROR Community Forum <ror-co...@ror.org>
Sent: Monday, January 5, 2026 6:27:39 PM
To: Arthur Smith <aps...@aps.org>
Cc: ror-co...@ror.org <ror-co...@ror.org>

Subject: Re: [ror-community] PID for faculties. Does anyone have an experience/solution?

 

External Email: Use Caution

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/ror.org/d/msgid/ror-community/CALY9fVo_4vubvq3zWk1ABf0LG9Uqw8XQDRpJmzNCVfLL5k6FgQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[JW LEE]

Hi Siobhann, (Arthur and Eva)

Could I get those guidelines you mentioned, as well?

Also, do you have any guidelines for managing ROR affiliation history (e.g., mergers, deletions, institutional succession)?

Best,

Jungwoo

2026년 1월 6일 화요일 AM 8시 27분 57초 UTC+9에 Siobhann McCafferty님이 작성:

[Erin Robinson]

Hi All - I want to echo Cátia's and others' points on the essential need for RORs for university subunits. I work with biological field stations, often university subunits, and considered facilities. We recommend that these stations have RORs so that they can be connected to the project metadata that they support, along with downstream outputs. It seems that the ROR community support and the demonstrated need for this are growing. 

Best, 

Erin  

  

[Maria Gould]

Hi everyone,

I am glad to see different voices chiming in on this topic and using this forum to share their questions and perspectives. I wanted to share some comments on behalf of the ROR team to help clarify a few points in light of this discussion. 

ROR has always adhered to a specific focus on organization-level identification, motivated by a longstanding need for the community to have an open and reliable solution for the use case of tracking outputs and activities at the institutional level. Within this scope, we take a flexible and pragmatic approach, focusing on ensuring we have appropriate and comprehensive representation of all globally relevant entities to support this use case. (More information about our scope and inclusion criteria can be found here.) Our metadata schema also allows for relationships and hierarchies to be expressed between organizations, such as the ones that Jen alluded to (you can also read more about relationships in this blog post).

ROR's scope, metadata, and curation processes have all been guided by our underlying mission and shaped by community needs and input. This clear sense of purpose and definition as supported by the community has positioned ROR to become an integral component of scholarly infrastructure by enabling identification and disambiguation of institutional data at scale in systems around the world, freely and openly available for anyone. 

The question of department- and faculty-level identification is an important one to be sure, but as we continue to scale to meet growing worldwide demand, we see this as a separate problem to be solved. For example, we recommend that department- and faculty-level information is captured in discrete metadata fields, and not treated as part of an institutional-level metadata element, in order to enable more precise discovery and reporting. Furthermore, because department and faculty structures also vary significantly across institutions and in different regional and national contexts, and because ROR's function is to be a globally adopted registry, we believe that these sub-units are best represented and handled separately in their individual local contexts, or with additional approaches.

As a community-driven open infrastructure initiative, ROR continues to be responsive to the evolving needs of the community, and we are happy to continue to be part of ongoing discussions about how to best address this and other evolving use cases.

As many of you already know, ROR maintains an active and open community-based curation process, and continually reviews requests to add and update organization records in the registry. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if there are ever any specific questions about scope or representation; we are always happy to advise and discuss!

All the best,

Maria

Maria Gould, ROR Director

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[Rashed M Al-Sa'ed]

Hi Siobhann,

Many thanks for your kind reply and for sharing this information.

Yes, I would very much appreciate receiving the examples and any guidelines or recommendations that ARDC is developing. This would be extremely helpful.

Best regards,
Rashed Al-Sa'ed

Sent from my Galaxy

-------- Original message --------

From: JW LEE <jjag...@gmail.com>

Date: 1/7/26 02:07 (GMT+02:00)

To: ROR Community Forum <ror-co...@ror.org>

Cc: Siobhann McCafferty <siobhann....@ardc.edu.au>, "ror-co...@ror.org" <ror-co...@ror.org>, Arthur Smith <aps...@aps.org>

Subject: Re: [ror-community] PID for faculties. Does anyone have an experience/solution?

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Hi Siobhann, (Arthur and Eva)

Could I get those guidelines you mentioned, as well?

Also, do you have any guidelines for managing ROR affiliation history (e.g., mergers, deletions, institutional succession)?

Best,

Jungwoo

2026년 1월 6일 화요일 AM 8시 27분 57초 UTC+9에 Siobhann McCafferty님이 작성:

Hi Eva,

I can help. 

Facilities are within the remit of ROR and in Australia we use them. 

The ARDC is currently developing some guidelines about this Im happy to send you some examples and more info about our recommendations if that is useful?

Best,

- Siobhann 

On Tue, 6 Jan 2026, 01:44 Arthur Smith, <aps...@aps.org> wrote:

Hi Eva,

  there was a project to work on how to implement departmental/faculty/other subunit extensions to ROR a few years ago; I have access to a conclusion document but I don't think it was ever published. The summary was as follows:

ROR should extend the identifier scheme to allow organizations to describe their own internal structure. We see three options for this support:

1. ROR could defer to another entity or entities to handle extended identifiers

2. ROR could follow ARK’s qualifier format with each institution having its own resolver for their extended identifiers

3. ROR could provide a full central resolution service for extended identifiers

but I have not heard from this group in several years and I don't know if there is any current effort to continue pursuing this. Maybe others on this list have more info?

   Arthur Smith (American Physical Society)

On 1/5/26 2:53 AM, Eva Karbanová wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Is there anyone who has the experience with identification of faculties (and other university subunits) within repositories? As ROR isn't the option because faculties are out of the ROR's scope, our team is looking for some other effective solution. The reason is that in our country there is research evaluation  focused strongly on faculties, more than on mother organisations.

Thank you in advance for any insight/experience!

Eva Karbanová

National Library of Technology

Czech Republic, Prague

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[anita bandrowski]

Hi Erin,

Field stations are core facilities within a university. These fall under the purview of RRIDs.

Please see the blog that RRIDs and ROR posted to disambiguate the use case

https://ror.org/blog/2024-11-26-rrid-ror-facilities/

Siobhan is correct that ROR covers facilities like national labs, but they do not cover facilities at the level of things like a field station or a microscopy shared lab as those are organized units under a university. These fall into the RRID system because they are inputs to experiments.

Regards 

Anita 

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/ror.org/d/msgid/ror-community/e2d4d144-d8f8-47aa-a867-21e1ddddca48n%40ror.org.

--

All key biological entities deserve an #RRID!

orcid.org/0000-0002-5497-0243

[Adam Buttrick]

Hello,

Great to see all the discussion here! Quick point of clarification - field stations are in scope for ROR. We don't have extensive coverage of these (please submit more curation requests for your own or others you're aware of), but here is one example from the great FAIR ISLAND project, which Erin and colleagues from my team at CDL collaborated on -  Gump South Pacific Research Station / https://ror.org/04sk0et52. 

The great blog post Anita linked (and co-authored!) is nonetheless quite useful for distinguishing between other entities that sit at these boundaries. Feel free, of course, to also reach out to us directly with any questions about similar units.

Best,

Adam

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/ror.org/d/msgid/ror-community/CABNvvvgwsbQagYww1cJ6jMwOV471sDUAD-_Q5wEtBxRk2Jf9Dw%40mail.gmail.com.

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[Dr Zubaida Khatoon]

Honory Eva  Karbanová Happy Greeetings!

Many thanks for your response and for the helpful guidance.

Kind Regards

  Dr Zubaida Khatoon

[Dr Zubaida Khatoon]

Subject: Re: Guidelines and Examples

---

Honory,

Happy Greetings and wishes for New Year 2026.

And Happy Greetings of the Day! Thank you so much for the clarification. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from the facilities guidelines, and I would be equally pleased if these insights also extend to faculty considerations where relevant. I truly appreciate your willingness to share the recommendations with the group.

Please find enclosed my profile, cover letter, and CV for your kind reference.

Many thanks for your kindness and support.

Warm regards,
Dr Zubaida Khatoon

[Koen Bokern]

As a relative newcomer to the wide reaching field of research information I would like to share some thoughts on this topic, which also connects to other topics related to research information infrastructure.

If the topic of organization subunit PIDs were to be addressed, it could be beneficial if relevant stakeholders or those who can provide relevant expertise engage with OpenOrgs by OpenAire (see their site or YouTube), which provides a community curation platform for organization metadata to support the OpenAire Graph, including hierarchial structures that allow for self-created entities to be added that are out of scope of existing identifiers. OpenOrgs entities may not be a PID platform at the moment, but maybe it could be with some changes if the nature of the registered entities are suitable to have PIDs and there is a need for such a PID.

Currently some funder databases like the Dutch Research Council provide research subunit affiliation metadata to OpenAire Graph through their project database API so projects are actually linked to OpenOrgs subunits, while output is generally always linked to top-level organizations. Although a full move to CrossRef grant DOIs for sharing project metadata would remove this granular insight from the graph, since the grant scheme uses ROR and subunits are out of ROR's scope. The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) initiative may also be held back due to a lack of connection with organization sub-units.

In the Netherlands national research assessment processes at universities and universities of applied sciences includes self-evaluation reports on the level of organization sub-units.

But organizations may use Research Information Systems to self-curate their output, so the need for subunit PIDs is kept low, although a complete public database would facilitate easy import and prevent the need for manual registration of works at multiple institutes.

I believe RIS use may be necessary though as long as affiliation strings and affiliation metadata are used for both author identification and indication of significant contribution, there are no universal affiliation guidelines (or they may not be fully freely available) or adherence to them is too low.

Relevant link: https://publicationethics.org/topic-discussions/claiming-institutional-affiliations

At our university of applied sciences, with limited academic output and more of a focus on self-published reports it is especially clear that for instance OpenAlex contains works with an affiliation to our institute for lagging publications from earlier employments or due to students performing research at other institutes while they could be considered part of the group of the other institute.

With (near) perfect public metadata an organization could use the publicly available information as a RIS. Graphs like OpenAlex and OpenAire could provide a RIS functional layer that would also make RPO support these platforms and use the public database, which would only  require a single data entry instead of repeated registration in multiple RIS.

If the organizations or their researchers would curate their work on such a platform the public database quality would also be improved.

So while the need for subunit PIDs may be kept low currently, creating them could accelerate the use persistent identifiers, public databases and improve the quality of public metadata. A perfect metadata landscape would require behavioural change (through metadata expertise) from all involved and not just new infrastructure.

Kind regards,

Koen Bokern, research data steward at Aeres University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands

[Eva Karbanová]

Thank you all very much for your answers! 

Our team will take all of your tips and experiences into consideration/discussion. We really appreciate all helpful comments and notes mentioned here. Hopefully we'll manage to find the best solution possible. 

If anything new and relevant to this topic appears, we surely will share the news here. 

Kind regards,

Eva Karbanová

National Centre for Persistent Identifiers 

National Library of Technology, Prague, Czech Republic

 

[Amanda French]

Hi all,

Wanted to share some information that is neither about faculties nor facilities but specifically addresses Jungwoo's request for "guidelines for managing ROR affiliation history (e.g., mergers, deletions, institutional succession)", which I don't think anyone else has taken up.

If you're seeking to track institutional mergers and institutional successions using ROR, Jungwoo, that is definitely something we can help with. ROR records are persistent and are therefore never deleted, but when a record is created in error it receives a status of "withdrawn." When an organization ceases research operations, it receives a status of "inactive." In cases where there's a merger or a successor institution, that's captured in the `relationships` element, which can have a value of "Predecessor" or "Successor".

The specific guidance that might help you is our documentation on using the advanced query endpoint of the ROR API to find inactive child organizations of a parent organizations. Remember too that by default, queries of the ROR API return only active records, but you can add the ?all_status flag to any query to get inactive and withdrawn records. You can also download the whole ROR dataset and filter it for "Predecessor" and/or "Successor" values in the `relationships` field. 

If you'd like to create new ROR records for inactive organizations and identify them as predecessors to existing organizations, we can do that as well via the regular ROR record request process.

Would any of that help you, Jungwoo? If not, let us know more about what you'd like to do!

Cheers,

Amanda

Amanda French
ROR Technical Community Manager
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