At Open Repositories 2026, we shared an update on a challenge many of us run into when working with research monitoring: identifying sub-organisational units (departments, faculties, labs) in a stable, unambiguous way.

Registries like ROR have become a key backbone for organisation identifiers at the root level, but they don’t yet provide authoritative persistent identifiers for internal units across institutions. In practice, this makes it hard to:

reliably connect outputs (publications, datasets, software) to the right department/faculty
build accurate organisation-unit–level dashboards
compare uptake of Open Access, FAIR-related indicators, or other metrics within an institution (not only across institutions)

The approach presented at OR 2026

The OpenAIRE Graph is addressing this gap by leveraging Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) as a structured source for organisational hierarchies.

CRIS systems typically model organisation structures natively and assign “Universally Unique Identifiers” (UUIDs) to organisational units. These IDs are often more stable internally than names, and they represent the hierarchy explicitly (e.g., department → faculty → institution).

The key point: instead of inferring sub-units from free text affiliations, we can integrate curated organisational hierarchies coming from institutions’ CRIS, and align them with known root organisation registries (like ROR).

Where OpenOrgs fits in

In the presentation we showcased OpenOrgs, a service designed to support:

ingesting organisation metadata from institutional CRIS and existing registries (e.g., ROR, PIC IDs, funder registries)
identifying potential duplicates and overlaps
enabling data curators to review and adjust matches and hierarchies

This curation step is important: it lets institutions validate how their internal units connect to root organisations in widely used registries.

What this enables in the Graph

With this integration, the OpenAIRE Graph can support more reliable linking between:

sub-organisational units (departments/faculties)
and research outputs + related entities (projects, funders, research communities)

This opens the door to better filters and analytics at unit level, including:

Open Access uptake by faculty/department
FAIRness indicators by unit
internal assessment and strategic planning views

We’d love to hear from you: do you currently need department/faculty-level reporting? For what use cases (monitoring, repositories, CRIS reporting, strategy)?

If you’re curious to dig deeper, the slides and audio from the OR 2026 talk are available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20789055