Add your organisation to FAIRsharing directly from ROR

This summer the developers have been busy, and a new exciting feature is now available in FAIRsharing: Research Organization Repository (ROR) organisations can now be automatically imported when editing FAIRsharing records.

The ROR repository contains more than 100,000 top-level organisation entities, making it an important resource for organisation alignment and display. Last April, the initial integration between ROR and FAIRsharing was completed. This was a concerted effort by curators and developers to check for matches between each FAIRsharing organisation and ROR. To keep the mappings up to date, periodic checks are performed to see if new matches between the organisations of both repositories exist.

Now, when a new organisation is added as part of FAIRsharing record editing, it is possible to search for it directly in ROR. The user can put any word in the name search box as shown in Figure 1 below, press the button “IMPORT FROM ROR” and select from a list of matching organisations from ROR as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1. Keyword entered in the Organisation Name field to import from ROR

Figure 2. List of organisations obtained when searching in the ROR

Once an organisation is selected, the ROR metadata fields are automatically populated within FAIRsharing (Figure 3). If no match is found in ROR, the user can choose to create a FAIRsharing organisation without a mapping to ROR.

Figure 3. Fields of the organisation automatically obtained from the ROR.

Behind the scenes, an API call is performed to the ROR server to carry out the search. Then the response is processed and the options are displayed (Figure 2). The filling of the fields (Figure 3) do not require a new API query as the information is already there. Some of the fields such as the ROR link (ID used in the ROR) and alternative names of the organisation are also updated in the FAIRsharing database.

If the user wants to search for an organisation and if the organisation is not in the ROR database, they will get an error message as displayed in Figure 4. It is always possible for users to create a FAIRsharing-only organisation where necessary.

Figure 4. Error when organisation is not found from the ROR.

This new feature allows users to easily add new organisations from ROR without the need to fill the information manually. Also, it provides greater integration between ROR and FAIRsharing.

This article was written by Ramon Granell, Prakhyat Gailani and Allyson Lister.