We are capturing ROR information for institutional affiliations, but we also allow the addition of optional department/center/institute information in a separate field alongside these institutional affiliations. We’ve had some folks submit multiple entries for the same author for “Stanford University” as the institutional affiliation with different department/center/institute affiliations. This makes sense because lots of folks here have multiple affiliations within the university and they want them all listed. The issue is that we have been stripping this extra info when we send metadata to DataCite because they don’t have a field for that. But then our metadata fails validation because we are sending the same institution twice.
Is it acceptable/unacceptable/desirable/undesirable to concatenate the institution and department info in the text field for the affiliation, even though that’s not an official name of the institution?
In the case in question, the user entered “Stanford University” with “Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology” and then entered “Stanford University” with “Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.” In both cases the appropriate ROR was captured, Research Organization Registry (ROR) Search. We could send these as “Stanford University, Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology” and “Stanford University, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine” with the same ROR both times. But I’m wondering if that’s considered bad form.
The other option is to only send a single entry for a given ROR. We’d just have to do some finagling on our side to run that check every time.