We’re pleased to announce that Symplectic Elements now includes integration with the Research Organization Registry (ROR) – a key enhancement to our new External Organisations functionality and a significant step forward in enriching and disambiguating affiliation data across the research lifecycle.
What Are External Organisations in Elements?
In Symplectic Elements 6.22, (released in early 2025), we introduced a new External Organisations data category. Symplectic Elements now maintains an authoritative list of External Organisations – institutions outside your own – which is used to normalize and enrich metadata relating to co-author affiliations, funding bodies, and other collaborative relationships. This dedicated data category is populated through a combination of trusted sources, including GRID, Dimensions, and now ROR.
This new approach enables more structured and consistent treatment of external entities across the system, supporting clearer collaboration insights, stronger reporting foundations, and more reliable metadata for open research initiatives.
This means:
- Fewer manual entries and less ambiguity around institutional names
- More accurate tracking of external affiliations across researchers, publications, and grants
- Improved support for reporting on collaborations and research partnerships
- A stronger foundation for funder acknowledgment metadata and impact analysis
How ROR Integration Supports Your Data
ROR (The Research Organization Registry) is the leading open registry of persistent identifiers for research organizations. With ROR now integrated into Symplectic Elements, the platform can automatically enrich External Organisation records with up-to-date, authoritative metadata, sourced directly from ROR and from partners like Dimensions.
In addition to enhancing administrative workflows, these identifiers will increasingly become visible to researchers as affiliation data is harvested from publication sources such as Crossref – ensuring your users benefit from clearer, more consistent records.
This integration not only enhances the integrity of organizational data, but also supports institutions in tracking external partnerships, mapping research networks, and advancing open research infrastructure.
“Integrating ROR into our External Organisations model is aligned with our mission to connect institutions with high-quality data sources,” said Ben Heartland, Product Manager at Symplectic. “This enhancement ensures accurate and transparent organizational affiliation reporting for our community of researchers worldwide.”
By unifying metadata from across your institutional network with persistent, open identifiers, this development lays the groundwork for even richer research intelligence – all enabled through Symplectic Elements.