A Ringgold Identifier (Ringgold ID or RIN) is a persistent numeric

unique identifier A unique identifier (UID) is an identifier that is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose. The concept was formalized early in the development of computer science and information systems ...

for organizations in the publishing industry supply chain. Ringgold's Identify Database includes over 500,000 Ringgold IDs representing organizations and consortia who acquire scholarly publications and content. The Ringgold ID was introduced in 2003. Ringgold developed it in response to an issue raised by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

, namely how to identify institutional subscribers unambiguously. The system is owned and administered by Ringgold, Inc. and Ringgold, Ltd., who also publish a

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

for classifying the subject interests of the listed organizations. Ringgold is an

International Standard Name Identifier The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an identifier system for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, television programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of ...

(ISNI) registration agency, and as such the US

National Information Standards Organization The National Information Standards Organization (NISO; ) is a United States non-profit standards organization that develops, maintains and publishes technical standards related to publishing, bibliographic and library applications. It was found ...

(NISO) recommended that Ringgold IDs be used to identify organizations involved in scholarly communications. Ringgold Identifiers are used by

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...

, to record the institutional affiliation of individual researchers.

References

External links

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Aligned ISNI and Ringgold identifiers for institutions
at

Zenodo Zenodo is a general-purpose open repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. It allows researchers to deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artef ...

Identifiers Academic publishing Library cataloging and classification Oxford University Press 2003 introductions {{publishing-stub