Amanda French, Technical Community Manager for ROR, is a well-known community manager and project director in the digital humanities and scholarly communication sphere. Most recently, she served as Community Lead at The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, where she helped build and nurture a community of more than 800 volunteers dedicated to collecting and publishing key COVID-19 data. Prior to that, she directed the Mellon-funded project ‘Resilient Networks for Inclusive Digital Humanities’ at GWU Libraries, directed the Digital Research Services unit at Virginia Tech Libraries, led the THATCamp unconference initiative at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and was a member of the first cohort of CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows. She often speaks and sometimes writes about openness in scholarly publishing, crowdsourcing, Agile, digital humanities, and related topics. In her free time she plays guitar, plants pollinator-friendly flowers, and enjoys the company of one dog and three cats.
Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned. Crossref and ROR are therefore working together to ensure that Crossref members and funders can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.
The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” So far, everyone has heard of it – it’s a very well-known poem indeed. I then explain that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle, and that a villanelle is a poetic form something like a sonnet. So far, everyone also knows what a sonnet is, which is why I use that as a comparison, even though a villanelle isn’t all that much like a sonnet, in my opinion. They’re both poetic forms, however, with a particular standard number of lines and a particular standard rhyme scheme, so in that sense they certainly are alike.
