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Revises department FAQ
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amandafrench committed Aug 24, 2023
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Expand Up @@ -103,7 +103,7 @@ Yes, ROR metadata includes both parent-child organizational hierarchies and late

### **Why doesn't ROR include university departments?**

ROR is focused on addressing the fundamental affiliation use case and increasing interoperability with other systems, and therefore it is not focused on capturing all subdivisions of a given organization, such as a university’s academic departments. The more granular the registry, the less suited it is to address the use case of tracking outputs at the institutional level. The "high-level" institutional information in ROR is also more stable than departmental information and is therefore better suited for persistence. ROR concentrates on maintaining inclusive global coverage of research organizations rather than on capturing the internal structure of organizations, and this approach keeps ROR easy to use. Additionally, some high-level sub-units of organizations are in scope for ROR, such as research institutes. Because ROR's code and data are entirely open, ROR users are free to build upon it in their local integrations to add their own department-level taxonomies.
ROR is focused on remaining as easy to implement and as easy to maintain as possible, and therefore it is not focused on capturing all subdivisions of a given organization such as a university’s schools or departments. ROR does support organizational hierarchy, and units such as research institutes and laboratories are in scope for ROR. The more granular the registry, however, the less suited it is to address the key use case of connecting research outputs to research organizations and the more difficult it is to implement and maintain. University departments in particular often emerge, close, combine, and change: the "high-level" institutional information in ROR is more stable and is therefore better suited for persistence. Moreover, ROR strives to maintain inclusive and consistent global coverage of research organizations, and while "schools" and "departments" are common terms and units for many universities, they are by no means universal. ROR might extend its scope in the future, but in the meanwhile, because ROR's code and data are entirely open, ROR users are free to build upon it in their local integrations to add their own school- and department-level taxonomies.

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