Saxon ROR

A curated, regularly updated subset of the Research Organization Registry (ROR) containing every organization located in Saxony (Sachsen), Germany — plus a small, deterministic browser to search it.

Live site: https://slub.github.io/saxon-ror/

Maintained by the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB).

Why this exists

The official ROR search is fuzzy — often to the point of being unhelpful when you know exactly which institution you are looking for. Common alternatives (e.g. OpenAlex) serve remixed rather than original ROR data.

This project offers two things the alternatives do not:

1. The unmodified, original ROR records for Saxon institutions, stored verbatim (only re-indented; no field changes, additions, or deletions).
2. A deterministic, predictable search: case- and accent-insensitive substring matching across every name variant and the ROR ID, sorted alphabetically. No fuzzy matching, no ranking magic. If a substring is in the data, you will find it; if it is not, you will not.

What's in data/

The data/ root holds the authoritative ROR subset. This repository is about ROR, so ROR is not treated as "a source" — it is the primary data.

Path	Contents
data/records/<ror-id-suffix>.json	One file per organization, stored unmodified
data/records.json	The combined array of all records
data/records.csv	Convenience CSV, one row per record (names, identifiers, dates, relationships); multi-value fields are "; "-joined
data/meta.json	Dump version, Zenodo DOI + creation datetime, retrieval date, record counts
data/reuse/<source>/…	Derived companion data (see below)

Filter criterion

A record is included when any of its locations is in Saxony:

• v2 schema (current dumps): a location whose geonames_details has country_code == "DE" and country_subdivision_name == "Saxony" (or country_subdivision_code == "SN").
• v1 schema (historical dumps, see backfill): an address whose geonames_city.geonames_admin1.id == 2842566 (the GeoNames admin1 ID for Saxony), falling back to state code DE-SN / state name Saxony for a German record.

All organization types (education, funder, facility, government, healthcare, nonprofit, company, archive, other) and all statuses (active, inactive, withdrawn) are included. Neighbouring subdivisions such as Lower Saxony (NI) and Saxony-Anhalt (ST) are deliberately not matched.

Companion sources (data/reuse/)

ROR is authoritative here. Other datasets that describe the same institutions live under data/reuse/<source>/ as derived companion layers — never merged into the ROR records. The first such source is OpenAlex.

Every companion source follows the same pattern:

data/reuse/<source>/
├── records/<ror-id-suffix>.json   # keyed by ROR ID suffix, pairs with data/records/
└── records.json                   # combined array

plus its own block in data/meta.json (retrieval date, match statistics, data license, access terms — future sources may not be CC0 or openly accessible) and a matching scripts/update_<source>.py. This keeps the data/ root clean: new sources can be added without restructuring.

OpenAlex

OpenAlex institution entities are keyed by ROR ID, so each record here is fetched via filter=ror:<id> from the OpenAlex institutions API and stored unmodified under data/reuse/openalex/. Only the institution entities are kept — their built-in aggregates (works_count, cited_by_count, counts_by_year, topics) travel with the entity. No works/publication metadata is fetched.

OpenAlex data is CC0, like ROR. It is a derived layer that may lag behind or diverge from ROR; some ROR records have no OpenAlex counterpart, which is normal. Match statistics are recorded in data/meta.json.

Data provenance

• ROR — original data dumps published on Zenodo under the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.6347574. The scripts always resolve the concept DOI to the latest version and use the v2 schema JSON. Licensed CC0 1.0. The exact dump version, version-specific DOI, and retrieval date are recorded in data/meta.json.
• OpenAlex — fetched from the public OpenAlex institutions API (no authentication, polite pool via a mailto parameter). Licensed CC0 1.0. Derived companion data; ROR remains authoritative.

Disclaimer

This is a community subset maintained by SLUB Dresden. It is not an official ROR product. ror.org remains the authoritative source. The data here is a filtered copy and may lag behind the live registry between updates.

Reporting an error in a record

Records are not modified in this repository — they are a verbatim copy of the official dump. To correct an organization's data, use ROR's curation process, which flows back into the next dump and therefore into this subset.

Each record's detail page links to its ROR curation requests: data/curation.json maps a record to the relevant curation issue numbers, and scripts/update_curation.py enriches them with live titles/states at deploy time (--seed bootstraps the map by searching issue titles for the record's ROR URL).

For issues with this repository specifically (the website, scripts, or the filter), please open a GitHub issue.

Running the update locally

The scripts use the Python standard library only (no third-party dependencies). Python 3.11+ is recommended.

# 1. Refresh the authoritative ROR subset from the latest Zenodo dump.
python scripts/update_ror.py

# 2. Refresh the OpenAlex companion layer (reads data/records.json).
python scripts/update_openalex.py --mailto you@example.org

Both scripts download the raw dump to a temporary directory outside the repository and commit only the filtered Saxon subset — raw ROR dumps are never committed. update_ror.py fails loudly (non-zero exit) if the filtered set is empty or shrinks by more than 20% versus the previous run, guarding against an upstream schema change silently breaking the filter.

Previewing the site

The site is plain HTML/CSS/JS with no build step. Serve the repository root and open the www/ directory; the page resolves data/ relative to itself:

python -m http.server 8000
# then open http://localhost:8000/www/

Automation

• .github/workflows/update.yml runs monthly (and on manual dispatch), executes both update scripts, and — if the data changed — opens a pull request summarizing added/removed/modified records. It never pushes to main directly.
• .github/workflows/pages.yml deploys www/ together with the data files it needs to GitHub Pages.

Git history as a change log

The git history was backfilled from every historical ROR dump version (going back to 2022) with each commit dated to that dump's Zenodo publication date. As a result:

git log --format='%ad %s' --date=short data/records/

reads as a true timeline of Saxon ROR records. Note the schema switch from v1 to v2 partway through: records are stored in whatever schema their dump provided (v1 records are not converted to v2), so the large diff at the transition is honest and expected. Each dump's schema version is recorded in data/meta.json.

The backfill is a one-time operation (scripts/backfill_history.py), run manually on a dedicated branch and merged via PR; it is not part of the scheduled workflow. OpenAlex has no equivalent public snapshot history, so its companion data starts at the present.

Repository layout

saxon-ror/
├── README.md
├── LICENSE                     MIT (the code)
├── data/
│   ├── LICENSE                 CC0 1.0 (the data)
│   ├── meta.json
│   ├── records.json            authoritative ROR subset
│   ├── records.csv
│   ├── records/*.json
│   ├── curation.json           record → ROR curation-request issue numbers
│   └── reuse/                  derived companion sources
│       └── openalex/
│           ├── records.json
│           └── records/*.json
├── scripts/
│   ├── ror_lib.py              shared helpers (stdlib only)
│   ├── update_ror.py
│   ├── update_openalex.py
│   ├── update_curation.py
│   └── backfill_history.py
├── www/                       static website (deployed to GitHub Pages)
└── .github/workflows/
    ├── update.yml
    └── pages.yml

License

The code (scripts and website) is licensed under the MIT License. The data under data/ is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal; ROR and OpenAlex data are themselves CC0.

References

External resources for this project's data sources, collected in one place.

ROR

• Website: https://ror.org/
• REST API: https://api.ror.org/v2/organizations
• Schema: https://github.com/ror-community/ror-schema
• Curation request: https://curation-request.ror.org/
• Curation tracker (issues): https://github.com/ror-community/ror-updates
• Data dumps (Zenodo, concept DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6347574

OpenAlex

• Website: https://openalex.org/
• Institutions API: https://api.openalex.org/institutions

Other

• Saxon Styleguide: https://www.styleguide.sachsen.de/