CCC Announces Acquisition of Ringgold, Leading Provider of Organization Identifiers in Scholarly Communications

Acquisition Reflects CCC’s Ongoing Commitment to Promoting Interoperability, Addressing Market Friction, and Collaborating with Stakeholders

CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, has acquired Ringgold, a longstanding provider of persistent organization identifiers widely used by the scholarly communications community. With offices in the US and UK, Ringgold is now a wholly owned subsidiary of CCC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Enhanced data quality is a differentiator, powering solutions in the scholarly communications landscape. Persistent identifiers (PIDs) that are globally unique and associated with accurate metadata about an article, a grant, a person, a project, or an organization play a vital role in the ecosystem.

Ringgold is a recognized leader in PIDs for organizations and institutions. CCC has partnered with Ringgold for years and employs its identifiers to disambiguate author affiliations related to article processing charges in CCC’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications offering. Today, among its other services, Ringgold’s IdentifyDB identifier database contains more than 600,000 organization IDs and related metadata.

“Globally unique PIDs are essential for creating connections between articles, researchers, institutions, and funders,” said Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, CCC. “We look forward to collaborating with Ringgold and industry stakeholders to further invest in identifiers to power interoperability, and data-driven applications. In particular, we will collaborate with partners to infuse PIDs earlier in the research lifecycle, addressing market demand for consistent use of PIDs in the article workflow.”

“The value of PIDs in scholarly communications has grown exponentially and yet there are still unmet needs,” said Laura Cox, President, Chief Financial & Operating Officer, Ringgold. “This calls for a robust infrastructure, further experimentation to address specific use cases, and broader implementation of PIDs across the value chain. As part of CCC, we will join forces to expand partnerships, experiment to address new use cases, invest in infrastructure, and create new data and analytics offerings.”

CCC is a long-time supporter of the creation, development, and proliferation of identifiers, including supporting initiatives such as ORCID and ISNI. As a trusted partner in the evolution of hybrid and pure OA publishing models, CCC has brought together key OA stakeholders from the author, publisher, institution, funding, and vendor communities. CCC is a member of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), STM (International Association of STM Publishers) and SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing), and recently announced a partnership with OA Switchboard.

About CCC

A pioneer in voluntary collective licensing, CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) helps organizations integrate, access, and share information through licensing, content, software, and professional services. With expertise in copyright and information management, CCC and its subsidiary RightsDirect collaborate with stakeholders to design and deliver innovative information solutions that power decision-making by helping people integrate and navigate data sources and content assets.

About Ringgold

Ringgold (www.ringgold.com) has created a process for the identification of institutions and the relationships between organizations. Since 2003, Ringgold has been developing IdentifyDB, a curated authority file of more than 600,000 institutions spanning multiple industry sectors. Each institutional entry has been assigned its own unique Ringgold ID, which is mapped to the organizational hierarchy and a range of classification metadata, including consortium membership and the ISNI. A full list of the publishers, intermediaries, and universities who have adopted Ringgold data can be viewed on the Ringgold corporate site.

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