ROR Curation Advisory Board Overview

The ROR curation advisory board provides expert input to guide decision-making about changes to the registry and the long-term management of registry data. This input includes:

• Designing workflows to triage and coordinate requests in an efficient, scalable way and in line with community needs
• Guiding the development of ROR’s curation infrastructure to support the implementation of ROR’s curation policies and workflows
• Refining and reinforcing the policies and criteria used to determine when new organizations should (or should not) be added to the registry, in line with ROR’s stated scope
• How to determine authoritative sources of information about institutional metadata (i.e., the official name or acronym of a university)
• Preparing and updating metadata records for organizations in ROR
• How to ensure that ROR serves a global and multilingual audience with appropriate metadata fields for names in multiple languages and with multilingual support for API queries and front-end search functionality
• How to capture changes to records over time (i.e., what details to log when a record is changed, and how records might be versioned to capture changes over time)
• How the ROR data model might be adjusted in the future to better meet community needs (i.e., adding new metadata fields according to community priorities)

The curation advisory board is modeled after journal editorial boards and grant proposal study sections. Board members should:

• Be generally familiar with ROR and its goals
• Represent a broad cross-section of locations and institution types
• Have interest and experience in metadata quality and curation
• Have the availability to perform curation tasks and participate in meetings for approximately 1-2 hours/month

Board participation and collaboration takes place primarily asynchronously via Github, Google Docs, email, and other tools. The board currently holds a monthly conference call to discuss major decisions that need to be made or policies that need further refinement.

The core tasks of reviewing proposed changes and/or policy and workflow updates and participating in a monthly conference call represents 1-2 hours per month. Board members may take on additional tasks and projects according to their availability and interests.