Looking for input -- what to do about inactive organizations in ROR?

ROR Chat Room
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The ROR team is seeking your input on handling inactive organizations. Currently, all organizations listed in the ROR registry are (as far as we know) active organizations that currently exist and are involved in scholarly research. But we know that organizations change: they close, they merge, they split. ROR records themselves will persist, so ROR records need to indicate when organizations have become inactive for any reason.

The current ROR data model does not fully support describing changes to an organization’s status, so we’ve drafted a set of metadata options that we’d like your input on. Questions we’d like your help answering include:

  • Should we retain the current ROR data model, which includes a status field, and simply add more possible values for status, or should we change the data model so that status can include richer description?
  • Should we indicate successor organizations in the existing relationships field or via changes to the data model in the status field?
  • Should we include only active organizations by default in the ROR search UI, the ROR API, and the ROR data dumps?

We are therefore asking you to comment on our proposal for handling inactive organizations in ROR by July 15th.

Questions? Please ask in the comments of the proposal document so as to keep the discussion all in one place. As a community-curated registry, ROR not only welcomes but relies on your input.

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