  Digital information needs to be accessed and used in a manageable and
sustainable manner to facilitate the advancement of science and science
management. Many types of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are already in use and
well-established in support of the scholarly communication industry, mainly
digital objects (e.g., DOIs) and person identifiers (e.g., ORCID). PIDs improve
the interoperability of digital entities, make them reusable, and, at the same
time, foster FAIR principles. The main objective of this exploratory work is to
measure the degree and type of use of ROR identifiers by the online scientific
and academic ecosystem through link-based indicators. The analysis yielded
149,851 links to ror.org webpages: 147,154 links to ROR-based URLs and 2,698
links to other informative webpages under the ror.org website. The results
obtained evidence that the percentage of ROR identifiers linked is limited
(51.6% of ROR identifiers have been linked at least once). These links come
from a limited number of referring domains (242 unique domain names) and mainly
from bibliographic records (51.4% of links) and organization cards (36% of
links). While the distribution of ROR identifiers is biased towards Anglo-Saxon
countries (mainly United States) and types (companies), the educational
research organizations are the institutions most linked through their
corresponding ROR-based URLs. The connectivity between DOIs, ORCIDs and RORs
can be the spearhead to carry out new webometric and bibliometric studies, of
interest to characterize the presence, impact, and interconnection of the
global academic Web.
