Research Funders on Crossref

From commitment to connection: 200,000 grants in the scholarly record

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Funding is one of the key enablers of the research lifecycle, but has been one of the hardest parts of the scholarly record to identify, describe and connect. This is slowly changing as we have recently reached a very exciting milestone for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). What makes it remarkable is not only the numbers reached, but where the data comes from. Research funders, who joined Crossref as members, have actively contributed more than 200,000 grants to the Research Nexus (Figure 1).

Crossref’s GLS was first introduced in 2019, following extensive community consultation with research funders, as a solution to a problem: how to place research funding in the scholarly record as a research entity in its own right, that can be connected with other outputs. Crossref grant DOIs were the first PID that specifically allows for the permanent and unambiguous identification of the support that research funders provide to their grant recipients. It places research funding where it belongs, as a research entity worthy of its own metadata record that can be linked, interpreted, and updated as time goes on. With a funder-designed metadata schema, it facilitates the linking of funding to outputs through relationship metadata, building the Research Nexus, and supporting evidence-driven evaluation.

The active role of funders as owners and stewards of their grants’ description in the metadata, ensuring the records reflect reality, is what makes the resulting links between funding and outputs trustworthy enough to support evidence-driven evaluation, one verifiable data point at a time, as initiatives such as DORA and CoARA are calling on the research community to do.

Reaching 200,000 registered grants with Crossref’s GLS is a milestone that belongs to the entire community. It reflects a strong commitment to open, sustainable and interoperable infrastructure from funders around the world, and a shared conviction that connected metadata makes research more transparent, more accountable and more useful for everyone.

It’s an opportunity to share perspectives from some of our community members helping make this possible.

Fonds de Recherche du Québec

When Fonds de Recherche du Québec first began registering funding metadata and assigning Crossref grant DOIs to its funding through Crossref’s Grant Linking System, our primary driver was straightforward: traceability. We needed a reliable way to link research outputs back to the funding that made them possible. Crossref grant DOIs provided the missing data point in an interconnected identifier and metadata ecosystem, which includes ROR and ORCID. We hope that Crossref grant DOIs will genuinely improve the researcher experience through interoperability.

The journey hasn’t been without complexity. Establishing metadata governance required careful collaboration with our legal team to determine what information belongs on landing pages, how to handle updates when grant titles change, and how to protect the integrity of evaluated application data.

Our strategy moving forward centres on two pillars: connecting and tracing. Aligned with our Open Science commitments and guided by frameworks like CoARA and DORA, we want to trace not just publications, but the full spectrum of funded outputs, such as artistic works, exhibitions, patents. We’re not fully there yet, and cultural and technical readiness across the community remains a real challenge.

Reaching 200,000 registered grants signals that the infrastructure is maturing. For Fonds de Recherche du Québec, it’s a motivation to keep contributing to the Research Nexus.

– Antoine Drouin, Analyste en gestion stratégique-Fonds de Recherche du Québec

European Commission

Connecting funding to results at scale is essential for transparent, efficient research. When we began depositing European Commission research grant DOIs with Crossref, we were tackling a practical problem: grant identifiers were used inconsistently across publishers, repositories and reporting tools, making it difficult to trace outputs back to specific EU grants. A persistent, interoperable identifier helps turn fragmented references into durable links.

Grant metadata is central to our open science and open access strategy. Open, machine-readable funding information improves transparency about who funds what, and supports automated monitoring of policy requirements by connecting grants to publications and other outputs across the scholarly ecosystem.

Registering grant DOIs via the Publications Office of the European Union and depositing them with Crossref is now fully integrated into our internal workflows. We have learned that the DOI is just the starting point: long-term value comes from maintaining high-quality, consistent metadata throughout a grant’s lifecycle and updating it as information evolves.

The benefits are clear: improved discoverability of grants, stronger links between funding and outputs, and more robust reporting and analytics. Reaching 200 000 registered grants is a community milestone showing grant identifiers can work at scale and strengthen connections between funding and research results.

– Baya Remaoun, Head of Sector - CORDIS web & data at Publications Office of the European Union

Wellcome

Our motivation to join Crossref’s GLS was to be able to disaggregate research outputs between funders. Funders’ grant identifiers come in a range of formats, funders might change them over time, and there are also similarities between funders’ names, which is a challenge. Permanent identifiers, in this case, Crossref Grant IDs, are an opportunity to avoid some of the confusion if we are able to implement them throughout the research ecosystem.

Open Research information is a core part of our open science strategy, it is critical to both our ability to operate as a funder and to the translation of the research we fund into health impacts. That’s why Wellcome is a signatory of the Barcelona Declaration of Open Research Information. Grant metadata is core part of our work, as well as helping us to understand the outputs from the work we’ve funded, it is critical in enabling funders like Wellcome to position our portfolio effectively within the global landscape and enable equitable funding partnerships. In addition to linking grants through Crossref, our recent investment in OpenAlex to openly index grants is aiming to rapidly bolster the global visibility of grant metadata.

Internally at Wellcome we’re discussing how we can integrate grant DOIs into other workflows now that we have greater flexibility within our grants management system.

Externally we’ve struggled to see adoption of grant DOIs within the wider ecosystem, probably coming from challenges to surface the Crossref grant DOIs to our researchers but also uneven adoption across the ecosystem. Reaching the 200,000 grants registered with Crossref means that there are still huge opportunities to grow and evolve.

– Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead-Wellcome

As the Barcelona Declaration Call to Action on funding metadata makes clear, a rich and interoperable funding metadata landscape is a shared community endeavor. As grant records in Crossref grow, other members of the scholarly community need to ensure that they are included and reported back on their own record, closing the loop on funding reporting and contributing to a richer, more connected Research Nexus.

From 1990 to today: connecting HFSP's grant history to the research nexus

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a funder with over thirty years of funding history, making all of their funding metadata openly available is no small undertaking. In this conversation, I chat with Guntram Bauer, Chief Scientific Officer at the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), about how the organisation is working to register decades of grant data with Crossref, the challenges of linking historical awards to published research outputs, and what open, structured funding metadata means for accountability to member countries and the wider scientific community.

RGP: Why did HFSP join Crossref and decide to share its funding metadata openly?

GB: Accountability starts with openness and transparency. If we are not open as a global funding organisation, we can’t convey that message to our constituents, our grantees, and our community. Before we could share our metadata openly through Crossref, we would share our funding activities through annual reports with a simple list of awardees and projects. In the digital era there are new possibilities to do this better and demonstrate to our member countries what we do with the funds. For us, it is a very helpful way to fulfil our obligations and the due diligence that is expected of us.

We started registering decade-old grant metadata, something we had always wanted to do but that before the current waiver would have meant a big financial undertaking.

– Guntram Bauer, Chief Scientific Officer, Human Frontiers Science Program

RGP: How did you find integrating the Grant Linking System (GLS) within your existing workflows?

GB: It was very straightforward. We work with Proposal Central, through Altum, which also acts as our Crossref sponsor, to help HFSP handle grant operations and related metadata, which makes it all very easy. One thing we did think carefully about was what the grant landing page would look like: what information people would see when they clicked on a grant DOI. Before Altum, we couldn’t even add an ORCID to our workflows, let alone a Crossref grant DOI! Having structured metadata to support transparent reporting to our own supporting member countries has been very valuable.

This step was independent from our funding policies. Registering funding metadata and assigning Crossref grant DOIs was paralleled with informative campaigns and direct information to our awardees to inform them about the new way of acknowledging funding.

RGP: Can you tell us about HFSP’s experience registering historical grant data?

GB: When HFSP started working with Crossref to benefit from the Grant Linking System (GLS) and make our funding metadata openly available, we began by registering data about our fellowships. More recently, in the context of the newly introduced waiver for historical grant data, we started registering decade-old grant metadata, something we had always wanted to do but that before the current waiver would have meant a big financial undertaking.

RGP: Why are you so interested in registering historical grants?

GB: HFSP has been registering funding with Crossref for a while, and the recent announcement of the two-year waiver made us decide to make all our historical data available. That’s going back all the way to 1990! We have been doing it little by little. We are keen to introduce as much funding metadata as possible into the system, to improve our transparency, but also to add to the research nexus and be able to link our funding to outputs, even the decades-old ones.

RGP: Are there any challenges specific to registering historical grants?

GB: There are a couple. When registering a historical grant, from 2005 for example, the publications that came out of that funding couldn’t be linked to the Crossref grant DOI since it didn’t exist when it was published, so the connection is missing. This is one of the key added values to the GLS, which in our view is the ability to track the impact of funding. Additionally, grantees who were awarded their funding many years ago and are only now receiving a Crossref grant DOI may not be as primed as current grantees to use that DOI when acknowledging their outputs.

Encouraging recent grantees of their new Crossref grant DOI so they can start acknowledging their outputs is one thing. However, persuading earlier grantees to go back and inform publishers of a new grant DOI involves a lot of actors and many potential points of failure. How can those connections between grant DOIs and related outputs be established, beyond direct communication with grantees?

RGP: That is indeed a challenge that we are well aware of! What excites us going forward is matching those records back to historical outputs with automated strategies. These will increasingly allow us to match, connect, and insert relationships between published outputs and Crossref grant DOIs. This is only possible when both the output and the grant are registered with Crossref and there is enough funding metadata in the output record to make the match. The more metadata available about an award (such as award number and funder name) in the output’s metadata, the more matches we can make, and the more confident the community can be in them.

RGP: Is the GLS changing how you approach reporting or shifting the culture within the organisation?

GB: For us, it’s an evolving situation. There is definitely a demand from our member countries to be more open and transparent, for the accountability reasons we mentioned. As the only truly globally operating funder supporting basic rather than applied research, demonstrating our impact across such a diverse membership is not always straightforward. If anything, the GLS and Crossref grant DOIs can help us in making our reporting evidence-based and follow the impact of the funding.

We are very grateful to Guntram Bauer for his perspectives and insights.

Matching funders in scholarly metadata: linking names to ROR IDs

Jason Portenoy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In April 2025, we launched the metadata matching project, in order to add missing relationships to the scholarly metadata. We will do this by consolidating all existing and planned matching workflows, which enrich member-deposited metadata in Crossref. This unified service will result in a more complete research nexus. In this blog post, we share our latest milestone: developing and evaluating a strategy for matching funder metadata to Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers.

Key takeaways

Funder matching links funding organisation names to persistent identifiers, helping us understand how research outputs are funded and supported.
We built a new strategy to automatically match funder names in Crossref metadata to ROR identifiers.
Evaluated on a manually labeled dataset of 3,505 funder names, the strategy achieves 99% precision and 81% recall.
This is the first production deployment of Crossref’s new metadata matching framework, paving the way for future matching tasks across affiliations, references, grants, and more.

We did a brief demonstration of the funder matching process at our Community Update Call on 13th May 2026. You can watch a recording thereof on Youtube.

Introduction

In our recent blog post on metadata enrichment, we described the different ways that Crossref metadata can be enriched after its initial deposit, leading to a more complete research nexus. In this model, we can think of the metadata records served through the Crossref API as a result of several layers of enrichment applied on top of the initial deposit from a Crossref member. These layers may include member updates, community feedback, automated matching, and third-party datasets.

Metadata matching (layer 3) is when we use automated strategies to find missing relationships between entities within the scholarly record, such as relationships between research outputs, funding organisations, and grants, based on the unstructured information already present in the metadata. Our matching project aims to create a dedicated, consolidated metadata matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. We have identified the first six matching tasks that we’d like to tackle: funder name matching, bibliographic reference matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching.

Funder matching is a task of automatically finding an identifier of a funding organisation based on its name. Funder matching, when done well, improves the coverage and reliability of funding metadata, and the relationships between funding organisations and research outputs in particular. These relationships are critical for understanding how research is supported, tracking compliance with funder mandates, and enabling analyses of research investment.

Funder matching, as any type of matching, is not trivial because data can be noisy: the same organisation may appear under many variants, abbreviations, or translations, and some names are genuinely ambiguous. Our goal was to develop a matching strategy that results in a lot of additional identifiers while maintaining high quality of the results.

As part of this project, we will be switching the target identifier set for funder matching from the Funder Registry to the ROR registry, in line with our long-term plan to replace the Funder Registry with ROR. ROR provides an open, community-governed identifier system that is already used for affiliations and research institutions. It has become a well curated and widely-trusted catalog of organisations around the world involved in research, and it is very well suited to be the primary identifier for funders in Crossref. We are taking this opportunity to make a major move toward using ROR IDs.

This blog post describes the funder matching strategy we’ve developed and presents an evaluation of its performance, along with a new evaluation data set.

Overview of the funder matching strategy

At a high level, the funder matching strategy takes a funder name string from Crossref metadata as input and returns zero or one ROR IDs. While funder strings can occasionally map to more than one ROR ID, this strategy can only return at most one match per input string. Future versions of the strategy will allow for multiple matches.

The new matching strategy is based on the “single search” strategy previously developed at Crossref to match affiliation strings to ROR IDs, which is currently implemented in ROR’s API and which we plan to use to enrich affiliation metadata for works in Crossref. Funder matching and affiliation matching are similar tasks—they share the same target identifier set (ROR IDs), and they both use free-form text strings as their primary inputs. Most of these text strings are in English, so the strategy is optimized for English text; but the matching still works well on text in other languages, thanks in large part to ROR’s comprehensive catalog of multilingual alternate names.

However, there are also some differences in the way that these input strings tend to look across the two different tasks, so the strategy was adapted and refined specifically for funder matching. For example, affiliation strings are often much longer and contain information such as academic department and city/country in addition to the name of the institution; funder strings are usually more concise, which can often make it easy to identify an exact match in ROR, but requires more extensive exclusion criteria to prevent incorrect matches for generic names.

The flow chart diagram shows the basic steps that each funder name goes through when a match is attempted:

Flow chart diagram of the matching strategy’s steps to evaluate a funder name against potential ROR matches

After normalization, the name is compared to a list of country names and identifiers to identify if there is any country information. The name is then passed to a search engine—an indexed text-based search system such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch—to retrieve a set of 15-20 possible candidates of ROR organisations with similar names. At this point, we use a set of filters to discard any name matches that are unlikely to be correct (i.e., they tend to produce false positives). Some examples include matches for very short names, or names that are very generic (think “Department of Education,” without any other indication of which larger entity it may be a department of).

At this point, we have a set of candidate ROR IDs, with a corresponding set of organization names that may match our funder name. We score these names by their similarity to the input name (using a fuzzy matching algorithm), then select the best candidate based on this score and a few other heuristic measures. As a final step, we ensure that, if we identified any country information in the early stages of the matching, the ROR ID that we matched is consistent—while developing the strategy, we learned that failure to do this would be a significant source of false positives.

A core principle of the matching strategy is that it is relatively conservative: at several points in the pipeline, the strategy can explicitly abstain and return no match. This prioritizes precision over recall; we consider incorrect matches to be more harmful than missing ones. Nevertheless, this strategy will be able to fill in large gaps in the funder data, and we can be confident that we will not be making widespread mistakes. To verify this, we use an evaluation dataset, which is described in the next section.

Evaluation dataset for funder matching

To evaluate the funder matching strategy, we manually labeled an evaluation dataset that maps funder name strings from Crossref metadata to zero, one, or multiple ROR IDs. The funder names were extracted from a July 2025 snapshot of Crossref works metadata, which contains 25.7 million funder entries across 12.4 million works, representing just over 3 million unique funder name strings.

The distribution of funder names is highly skewed: a small number of names appear very frequently, while most appear only a handful of times. Because correct handling of common funders has a disproportionate impact on overall metadata quality, the evaluation dataset is a weighted sample, where each name is weighted by how often it appears without an asserted funder ID.

The final evaluation dataset contains 3,505 funder names, with a total weight of just over 2.1 million funder entries. Each name was manually labeled against the ROR registry, resulting in at least one ROR match for 1,895 names. In addition, for some cases, alternate matches were recorded to support “relaxed” evaluation in ambiguous scenarios.

Evaluation methodology

Evaluation is done by running the matching strategy on all names in the dataset and comparing the results to the manual annotations. The primary metrics are precision, recall, and the F0.5 score, which combines precision and recall while weighting precision more heavily. This reflects the project’s preference to avoid incorrect metadata assertions, even at the cost of lower recall.

In addition to standard (strict) evaluation, the framework supports relaxed evaluation using alternate matches. This is meant to address cases where funder strings might be ambiguous even for a human evaluator, or a matching strategy might identify a parent organisation of a target, which is not an entirely incorrect match.

Evaluation is performed along two independent dimensions. First, results can be calculated in an unweighted mode, where each funder name is treated as equally important, or in a weighted mode, where names are weighted by how frequently they appear without an asserted identifier in Crossref metadata. Second, evaluation can be strict or relaxed, depending on whether only the primary annotated ROR ID is considered correct or whether alternate, manually annotated matches are also accepted. Together, these dimensions produce four possible evaluation modes.

Results

Under relaxed, weighted evaluation, the funder matching strategy achieves a precision of 0.99, recall of 0.81, and an F0.5 score of 0.95.

The table below compares the performance of the matching strategy across four evaluation modes. The Relaxed Weighted mode represents the headline performance (Precision: 0.9897) as it accounts for both the frequency of names in the metadata (weighting) and valid metadata ambiguity (alternates). In practical terms, the results mean that when the strategy produces a match, it is correct (or acceptably close, in cases of genuine ambiguity) roughly 99% of the time.

Evaluation Mode	Precision	Recall	F0.5 Score	False Positives	False Negatives
Unweighted	0.9365	0.6024	0.8430	81	788
Weighted	0.9776	0.7948	0.9346	81	788
Relaxed Unweighted	0.9707	0.6445	0.8815	37	675
Relaxed Weighted	0.9897	0.8094	0.9475	37	675

While precision and recall are essential for understanding matching performance, there are other important considerations that also matter in practice. This strategy also scores high marks in some of these other criteria that we’ve identified:

Openness — The strategy is open source—source code here—and built on open source methods, in accordance with our commitment to POSI.
Explainability/Flexibility — This is not a black box machine-learning model; the steps, detailed in the overview I’ve given earlier, are fairly easy to understand, update, and apply to new data.
Resources/Speed — The strategy is very quick (averaging a matter of milliseconds per match), and does not require large amounts of intense computation or data storage.

From evaluation to production

This work represents more than an isolated matching experiment: it is intended to be the first production deployment of the new metadata matching framework. Bringing funder matching into production will involve not only implementing the strategy described here, but also standing up shared infrastructure for monitoring, iteration, and reuse across future matching tasks. Applying this new matching system across all of Crossref’s current and future funder data will be our next milestone in the project. Beyond that, we will move on to grants, affiliations, references, and more. The work we’re doing now of setting up infrastructure, refining evaluation methods, and working out any kinks as they arise, will all contribute to the momentum of the project. We’re very excited about all the enrichment of the research nexus that lies ahead!

Reduction of Grant DOI registration fees: a boost for the Research Nexus

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.

Launched in 2019 with close input from several funders and other infrastructure organisations, the GLS primarily offers the ability to create and steward Crossref Grant DOIs, along with several benefits such as dedicated grant/award metadata like funding type, value, contributors, and projects, as well as hosted landing pages, tools to create and update metadata, and of course both member-asserted and Crossref-automatic matching of relationships within the global corpus of 180 million other research objects. Essentially, we need to identify what research objects are produced as a result of the award, and these objects could be articles, preprints, data, code, blogs, posters, and more.

This connected network is what we call the Research Nexus, essential for exploring research activity in general, as well as evaluating reach and return on funding and other support like use of facilities/equipment.

A fee reduction and a two-year fee waiver pilot

Following a review by our Membership & Fees Committee, the Board met in December and passed two related motions:

Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee has been cut in half to match other record types: The board approved the adjustment of the Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee down from $2.00 to $1.00 USD, effective 1st January 2026.
Back-Year (BY) grant registration fee is waived through 2027: The board approved a time-limited fee waiver as a pilot for Back-Year (BY) grant registration fees, bringing that per-record fee down from $0.30 to $0.00 for 2026 and 2027.

We aim to boost registration of Back-Year (BY) records and accelerate the growth of the Research Nexus with millions more grant<->output matches. During the course of the two-year pilot, the Membership & Fees Committee and our fee project work that started in 2023 and also brought in other fee reductions, will consider more adjustments across BY registration fees for the benefit of members beyond just funders and beyond just grants.

All Board motions are publicly available and we encourage questions from the community about our governance processes and the decisions on our members’ behalf; email us via feedback@crossref.org anytime, or post on the forum.

Supercharging the Grant Linking System

Leading up to the GLS launch in 2019, we worked with a group of funders and metadata experts to inform the design and implementation of the new service, including a funder governance and fees working group. That was seven years ago, and our Funder Advisory Group now includes nearly 100 funding community representatives the GLS has grown to almost 50 funder members that have registered more than 185,000 open grant metadata records. But they are mostly research councils and agencies or charities from Europe and North America, and we know that for a truly comprehensive and interconnected Research Nexus, more needs to be done to include organisations from all parts of the world. The other key driver is simply to boost more metadata connections; the more grant metadata we gather, the better we can match it to all kinds of research outputs, and this metadata directly feeds thousands of services available in our community, from Dimensions and Scopus, to OA.Report and OpenAlex, as well as funders’ own analytics tools. See our recent report about the latest dataset and of course use api.crossref.org directly.

Relatedly, we just added a new Grant DOI field to our schema for all record types, to give our members a precise and accurate way of capturing funding metadata for all research outputs. With the new lower CY registration fee and a pilot waiver of BY fees for grant records, we hope to boost the creation of more Grant DOIs by more funders from more parts of the world—so that others also see and can build on the momentum and reuse the data in their own tools and services. All actors need to play their role, and Crossref’s part is in running the global linking infrastructure at scale, connecting research objects and making them openly available while ensuring that the barriers for the registration, use and reuse of metadata remain as low as possible.

We feel we’re at a tipping point that only needs a small nudge to truly scale the Grant Linking System.

By waiving BY fees entirely for two years, we’re hoping to see members fill in historical data and create more comprehensive grant<->outcome connections. There is often a long period of time between funding being awarded, and the resulting research objects being generated and communicated. That is why historical grant metadata is so important; we think that there will be many funding outcome relationships and insights just waiting to be uncovered!

Why give funders a fee break and not others?

We’re not ruling out this kind of fee incentive in future for other members and other object types, but that needs more analysis (which we plan to do) and right now, the relatively small number of grant records, combined with a growing need for this kind of metadata, means the changes are small enough to have almost no impact on Crossref’s healthy financial position.

This decision is consistent with the goals of our Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) to review our fees to make sure they are equitable and clear, while ensuring Crossref retains a sustainable business model. Our fees can encourage or discourage the community to participate in Crossref. The RCFS project has also resulted in the creation of a lower membership fee tier for the very lowest-resourced members, and the tidying up of things like outlier volume discounts.

The BY fee waiver is positioned as a pilot to allow us to measure its impact over the next two years and feed into the Membership & Fees Committee and RCFS project. We will evaluate the pilot results (i.e. does it indeed supercharge funding metadata connections and adoption?) and consider additional adjustments to other BY registration fees and whether such fee incentives might be extended to other members.

We encourage all funders to take advantage of these reduced rates to contribute to the Research Nexus and help us build a more complete picture of the relationship between research funding and outcomes.

Take a look at the recent case studies from early GLS adopters FWF (Austria), NWO (The Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome/EuropePMC, reach out to them or us with any questions, or peruse the GLS community forum!

Wellcome and Europe PMC: supporting Open Research through open metadata

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

Hannah: The motivation for Crossref Grant IDs is to be able to disaggregate research outputs between funders. Funders’ grant identifiers come in a range of formats, funders might change them over time, and there are also similarities between funders’ names, which is a challenge. Permanent identifiers, in this case, Crossref Grant IDs, are an opportunity to avoid some of the confusion if we were able to implement them throughout the research ecosystem.

This is also being discussed in different contexts, for example, within the Barcelona Declaration working groups, funders and other stakeholders are exploring the diverse motivations that exist to implement changes into our workflows, as well as the challenges that funding metadata and persistent grant IDs can help solve.

The way Wellcome implemented the Grant Linking System is a bit unique, given that it partnered with Europe PMC for the technical implementation and metadata registration with Crossref. Can you tell us more about how it works?

Hannah: The collaboration between Wellcome and Europe PMC in the implementation of Crossref’s Grant Linking System started because they already had the grants landing page feature ready and available to us.

There was an initial hope that other funders of Europe PMC, which also have these grant landing pages, could then leverage that same system to make Crossref grant IDs more broadly available to the research community, but I am not sure if that has materialised yet.

Melissa: Currently we are supporting Wellcome’s implementation of Crossref grant IDs, but the infrastructure remains available to other Europe PMC funders should they decide to take advantage of it. We already have funding metadata for Europe PMC funders because it is a requirement for grantees to select their grant identifier when submitting their accepted manuscripts for indexing and archiving. As we already have that metadata, naturally we can pull it together and send it to Crossref, along with the link to the Europe PMC grant landing pages!

An additional benefit of partnering with Europe PMC is the comprehensive metadata we deliver to Crossref with the grant IDs. For example, we have invested in supplementing affiliation data with ROR iDs and we deliver to Crossref all the data we have that matches their schema for grant data.

How is Wellcome leveraging the funding metadata and Crossref grants IDs that are being shared and registered with Crossref?

Hannah: We are discussing internally how we can better socialise the Crossref grant DOIs among the grantees, either via our grant management system or through Europe PMC. One place where the Crossref grant DOIs are being used and shared is through our publishing platform, Wellcome Open Research. The Crossref grant DOI is included in the publication metadata, ensuring that the research output is linked to the funding via the open metadata registered.

However, as we use Europe PMC as our repository for funded written research outputs, these outputs are aggregated alongside the grant records which includes the Crossref grant DOI, facilitated by Europe PMC APIs. So we have the means to link the two things together.

Melissa: There are some UX and technical blockers to fully integrate Crossref grant IDs within the Europe PMC grant system currently that are detrimental to the utility of these IDs, for example, you can’t search for a specific grant in Europe PMC grant finder using a Crossref grant ID. We are partnering with Crossref to solve these challenges and offer users more functionality in this space next year.

Hannah: Beyond eLife and Wellcome Open Research, I am not sure which publishers use Crossref grants DOIs in their workflows.

Rocio: That’s an interesting question, as we aren’t seeing a massive flow of Crossref grant IDs in the works metadata records just yet. We are exploring with publishers and their service providers how to make this business-as-usual, and in the meantime, we are running a series of matching projects to ensure that, when possible, we make those connections ourselves to enrich the metadata with funding information. We already insert reciprocal relationships where one record asserts a link with another (in this case, where either a grant Finances a work or a work isFinancedBy a grant record, Crossref adds in the reverse). Improving and enriching these relationships directly in the metadata makes sure that metadata provided by funders can make their way to the research outputs that originate from the grant.

Wellcome is streamlining the way of asking grantees to report on their publications, facilitated by Europe PMC. Can you tell us a bit more about how this will work and what role metadata will play?

Hannah: We will stop asking researchers to report their publications directly to us as part of progress and end-of-grant reporting. We believe there is sufficient open metadata with high-quality tagging in the ecosystem for us to collect written research outputs programmatically from this public data. Under our new system, we will be directing researchers to look at their grant record within Europe PMC and make sure that their written research outputs are properly linked there; otherwise, we won’t see them. We are trying to leverage open data, existing infrastructure, and a route that enables us to improve the completeness of open metadata.

There aren’t many mechanisms that enable our researchers to add assertions to funding and research output records retrospectively, and Europe PMC offers us that opportunity, and that is really critical for us. Rather than collecting information in our own system, we can contribute to enhancing the global corpus of knowledge and the quality of open metadata more broadly. Since correcting metadata at source isn’t easy, Europe PMC presents us with an opportunity to contribute to that system.

Melissa: We are thinking broadly about this problem; many institutions curate their research information in spreadsheets or closed CRIS systems and struggle to make it publicly available. We are thinking about how Europe PMC can be leveraged to be a public home for that data. EMBL-EBI hosts Europe PMC and utilises it as the institutional repository, so we have started a pilot project to add ROR IDs for affiliations to EMBL-authored publications within Europe PMC. This is manually curated, high-quality metadata that would otherwise be lost from the public ecosystem.

If you look into the future, what would your hopes be for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general? What do you think that we could achieve collectively as a community?

Melissa: It would be amazing (!) if everybody, from funders to publishers, to institutions and authors, would coalesce around the Crossref Grant Linking System, and add to metadata exchange workflows – you would potentially have a very clean and clear picture of where the money is going, what the outputs are, and how they relate.

Currently, even with the Open Funder Registry, there is ambiguity around funder names - for example, different geographical national funders sharing the same exact name as their counterpart in another country - so even with the best will in the world, funder institutions could be misidentified in systems and assigned the wrong identifier. The Crossref Grant Linking System facilitates complete disambiguation because grants are associated with the issuing funder’s correct identifier, ensuring traceability of outputs and funding and enabling more precise, cleaner metadata.

Hannah: I think that is a bit of the Holy Grail and in reality, its a bit messy, there isn’t just one system! We need to be able to move past the chicken and egg discussion, where we talk about the use of different identifiers, with sometimes competing priorities. For me, the real challenge for the metadata community is how do we enrich metadata, correct errors, and develop greater interoperability between PID systems. So that multiple parties can contribute towards the creation of a greater whole record, rather than relying on a single owner of the record to provide all the information. If we could all, funders included, connect information from individual partners to create a unified record at the end of it, we could have better records and probably save time by distributing the workload.

What would you say to colleagues in other funders about investing in open metadata?

We all need information from other partners in the ecosystem and investing in our own internal system will not give us the same return as collectively investing in opening up that information wherever possible.

——-

We are very grateful to Hannah Hope and Melissa Harrison for their perspectives on open funding metadata and the role of the community in ensuring a complete and comprehensive Research Nexus.

Integrating grant metadata for seamless research interconnectivity at FCCN|FCT

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the version in Portuguese

Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugal’s main public funding agency, about the agency’s approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure. With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra “register once, reuse always”, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.

Could you introduce your organisation?

We are FCCN, the digital services of the FCT, the Foundation for Science and Technology, which is the main public funding agency in Portugal. FCT supports research and innovation in Portugal through multiple funding instruments targeting researchers, projects, institutions and international partnerships. FCCN is focused on providing digital services to the scientific and academic community in Portugal.

I am the manager of a program called PTCRIS, part of the FCCN, within the ‘Scientific Knowledge’ pillar of the unit. PTCRIS is a broad program, whose main goal is to fulfill the mantra ‘register once, reuse always’. We aim to develop an integrated ecosystem of scientific information, so all the projects we run have this main goal and that’s what we work towards. We develop infrastructure and added-value services, such as the scientific curriculum vitae management platform and an indicator system that exposes information of all the funding that supports research and innovation in Portugal.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

We had already adopted ORCID and we also developed a national PID, connected to the citizen card additional to ORCIDs. In 2015 we adopted the ISNI and we also had DOIs for research outputs. So we were clearly missing one piece, which was metadata for funding. At the same time we started developing a national infrastructure on science and technology funding, to have an aggregated and holistic view of the funding that is distributed in Portugal.

Before that the information was scattered across different databases and websites from many different funders, so we organised and aggregated this information into a platform called SciPROJ, which brings together all the information on scientific funding in one place, with quick and flexible access. But we didn’t have persistent identifiers for grants, and this was at the same time that Crossref started to build the Grant Linking System, so we were actually one of the first organisations to join, and in 2023 we had a pilot, where we registered 6000 grants, and we have been registering funding metadata ever since.

Can you tell us about your experience using the Grant Linking System?

The beginning of the pilot was the most critical stage of the process; some effort was needed to map our data models to the Crossref grant metadata schema. FCCN wasn’t in a bad position to do this since we already had all that information in a registry and it was well organised, we just had to map them to make sure that the information we had could be shared following the Crossref metadata schema and best practices. It has been two years since the pilot, which puts us in phase 2 of the implementation of the system. During the pilot we concentrated on registering both historical and current grants’ metadata, in the current phase, we are focusing on current grants’ metadata.

What do you find useful about registering grant metadata with Crossref?

Although this is the very beginning of this journey, we envision a world where we have the ability to link grants to any other object and entity that comprises the ecosystem: people that execute that funding, projects, institutions, outputs. Outputs are something particularly important to us, like for many other funders, because we want to be able to monitor the impact of our funding and that is something that is always at the back of our mind.

We are actually developing more and more services that aim to show how these links can be very useful to retrieve information from the system. For example, we are developing an indicator system that is focusing on the funding but also on the outputs and the links between the two. We are also monitoring OA trends, to see how FCT funding is contributing to Open Science initiatives.

Additionally, our OA policy was recently launched but we currently don’t have any system that allows us to track policy compliance. We are working towards that, but to achieve this it is absolutely fundamental that grants are linked to the outputs through metadata.

What are your hopes for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general?

The interconnectivity and interoperability of entities and objects, which is something that the field of scientific information management has always wanted to do, but that it’s very difficult to do. There have been attempts in the past to achieve this using information from the acknowledgement sections of publications, but this is fairly inefficient and there needs to be more structure to it. A critical piece of this puzzle would be to influence publishers, manuscript submission platforms to facilitate the systematic sharing of grant IDs and grant metadata by design. I think this is something that is still missing and that I would like to see happening soon.

Has anything surprised you while implementing the Grant Linking System?

Something that we have seen that was surprising was that researchers, who in general are not that concerned about PIDs, when it came to grant IDs, they would ask us proactively what the Crossref grant ID for their award was! It was very refreshing to see that we didn’t need to do any advertising to socialize Crossref grant IDs among our grant holders. I think that tells you about the high level of awareness there is within our community of the importance of the Crossref grant ID, using it and putting it in the acknowledgment section of their publications.

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other research funders?

I would say go for it! The more the merrier! This is like any other similar information system – it only works if there are enough people using it, registering grants metadata that facilitate the links between objects.

It is a very easy process to get into. Once you map the metadata schema to your own data it’s not a technically difficult thing to do. For us it’s an automated process that runs very smoothly, from grant registration to communicating this information to grant holders. We can see this in action in this example: the grantee published an article that acknowledges their funding through Crossref’s grants IDs or funding received being acknowledged in the website of a Research Center.

If you could change something about the GLS or how the grant metadata you register is used, what would it be?

I would love to have access to a visualization of grants’ metadata, how many outputs are linked to, and how they relate to other objects and entities. That would really give us a clearer understanding of the impact that our funding is having. We’d also love to see better integration between Crossref and ORCID for grants—just like it works for publications. Ideally, when a grant is registered and linked to a researcher, they’d be notified and could easily add it to their ORCID record. This would allow the information to flow seamlessly into their national CV via PTCRISsync, ensuring consistency and reducing manual work.

We are grateful to Cátia Laranjeira and FCT|FCCN for sharing their perspective and long-standing experience in this space. Their experience highlights the role that funding metadata plays in an interconnected and complete research and funding ecosystem.

Version in Portuguese

Translation by Edilson Damasio

Integração de metadados de financiamento pela FCCN|FCT para reforçar a interoperabilidade da informação sobre a atividade científica

Bem-vindo(a) de volta à nossa série de estudos de caso sobre instituições financiadoras de investigação que utilizam o Grant Linking System. Nesta entrevista, conversamos com Cátia Laranjeira, gestora do programa PTCRIS na FCCN|FCT, a principal agência pública de financiamento à ciência em Portugal, sobre a abordagem da instituição aos metadados, identificadores persistentes, Ciência Aberta e Infraestruturas Abertas.

Com uma abordagem holística à gestão, produção e acesso à informação científica, a decisão da FCCN|FCT de integrar o Grant Linking System nos seus processos não representou apenas uma evolução técnica, mas sim um esforço coordenado para consolidar uma forte cultura de abertura. Sob o lema “registar uma vez, reutilizar sempre”, a adoção de metadados abertos de financiamento pela FCCN|FCT foi um passo natural e coerente com essa visão.

Poderia apresentar a sua organização?

A FCCN é a unidade de serviços digitais da FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, a principal agência pública de financiamento à ciência em Portugal. A FCT apoia a investigação e a inovação através de diversos instrumentos de financiamento dirigidos a investigadores, projetos, instituições e parcerias internacionais. A FCCN dedica-se a disponibilizar serviços digitais à comunidade científica e académica portuguesa.

Na FCCN|FCT, sou gestora do PTCRIS, um programa integrado no pilar do Conhecimento Científico. O PTCRIS é um programa abrangente que tem como objetivo central concretizar o princípio “registar uma vez, reutilizar sempre”. Trabalhamos para desenvolver um ecossistema integrado de informação científica, e todos os projetos que conduzimos convergem nesse propósito. Desenvolvemos infraestruturas e serviços de valor acrescentado, como a plataforma de gestão do currículo científico CIÊNCIAVITAE e um sistema de indicadores que disponibiliza informação sobre todos os financiamentos que apoiam a investigação e a inovação em Portugal.

O que motivou a adesão à Crossref?

A FCCN tinha já adotado o ORCID e desenvolvido um identificador nacional persistente (PID), ligado ao cartão de cidadão, como complemento aos ORCIDs. Em 2015, adotámos o ISNI e também tínhamos DOIs para a produção científica. Ficava claramente em falta um elemento: os metadados de financiamento.

Ao mesmo tempo, iniciámos o desenvolvimento de uma infraestrutura nacional de financiamentos de ciência e tecnologia, com o objetivo de ter uma visão agregada e holística do financiamento que suporta a investigação e inovação em Portugal.

Antes disso, a informação estava dispersa por diferentes bases de dados e websites de múltiplos financiadores. Organizámos e agregámos esta informação numa plataforma chamada SciPROJ, que reúne toda a informação sobre financiamentos científicos num único local, com acesso rápido e flexível. No entanto, ainda não existiam identificadores persistentes para os financiamentos, coincidindo com o momento em que a Crossref começou a desenvolver o Grant Linking System. Fomos, assim, uma das primeiras organizações a aderir. Em 2023, realizámos um piloto com 6.000 financiamentos registados, e desde então temos vindo a registar continuamente os metadados de financiamento.

Pode falar-nos sobre a sua experiência com o Grant Linking System?

A FCCN iniciou a utilização do Grant Linking System com um piloto, que constituiu a fase mais crítica do processo. Foi necessário algum esforço para mapear os nossos modelos de dados para o esquema de metadados de financiamentos da Crossref. A FCCN estava, no entanto, bem posicionada para isso, uma vez que já dispunha de toda a informação num registo organizado; o passo necessário foi apenas assegurar que esta informação pudesse ser partilhada de acordo com o esquema de metadados da Crossref e as melhores práticas.

Já passaram dois anos desde o piloto, o que nos coloca na fase 2 de implementação do sistema. Durante o piloto, focámo-nos no registo de metadados de financiamentos históricos e atuais; na fase atual, estamos focados no registo de metadados de financiamentos atuais.

O que considera útil no registo de metadados de financiamento na Crossref?

Embora este seja ainda o início deste percurso, a FCCN idealiza um ecossistema em que seja possível ligar financiamentos a qualquer outro objeto ou entidade do sistema científico — projetos, pessoas que executam esses financiamentos, instituições onde são executados e produções científicas que dele resultam. Estes últimos são particularmente importantes para nós, como para muitos outros financiadores, pois queremos monitorizar o impacto do financiamento — uma preocupação que está sempre presente no nosso trabalho.

Estamos, de facto, a desenvolver serviços que demonstram o valor dessas ligações para a recuperação de informação no sistema. Um exemplo é o sistema de indicadores em desenvolvimento, que se centra nos financiamentos, nas produções científicas e nas relações entre ambos. Estamos também a acompanhar as tendências de Ciência Aberta, para perceber de que forma o financiamento da FCT está a contribuir para as iniciativas de Open Science.

Além disso, a política de Acesso Aberto da FCT foi recentemente lançada, mas ainda não dispomos de um sistema que permita monitorizar a conformidade com essa política. Estamos a trabalhar nesse sentido, mas para o concretizar é absolutamente essencial que consigamos associar inequivocamente os financiamentos às produções científicas através de metadados.

Quais são as suas expectativas para o GLS e para uma maior transparência dos metadados de financiamento em geral?

A interconectividade e interoperabilidade entre entidades e objetos é algo que a área da gestão de informação científica sempre procurou alcançar — embora seja um objetivo difícil de concretizar. No passado, houve várias tentativas nesse sentido, recorrendo à informação presente nas secções de agradecimentos das publicações, mas esse método revelou-se pouco eficiente e carece de uma estrutura mais sistemática.

Uma peça essencial deste puzzle seria influenciar as editoras e as plataformas de submissão de manuscritos a facilitarem a partilha sistemática de identificadores e metadados de financiamento. Este é um elemento que ainda falta concretizar, mas que gostaríamos de ver implementado em breve.

Algo o surpreendeu durante a implementação do Grant Linking System?

Algo que nos surpreendeu durante a implementação do Grant Linking System foi a reação dos investigadores. Normalmente, os investigadores não demonstram grande preocupação com identificadores persistentes (PIDs), mas, neste caso, começaram a procurar ativamente o identificador Crossref do seu financiamento! Foi muito positivo perceber que não foi necessário fazer qualquer esforço de divulgação para promover o uso dos Grant IDs da Crossref entre os beneficiários dos financiamentos. Isso mostra o nível de consciência existente na comunidade científica sobre a importância destes identificadores — usá-los e incluí-los na secção de agradecimentos das publicações.

Com base na sua experiência, qual seria o seu conselho para colegas de outros financiadores de investigação?

Com base na nossa experiência, o conselho para outros financiadores seria simples: avancem! Quanto mais, melhor! Este tipo de sistema de informação só é verdadeiramente eficaz quando há muitas entidades a utilizá-lo, a registar metadados de financiamento e a criar ligações entre objetos.

É também um processo simples de implementar. Uma vez feito o mapeamento entre o esquema de metadados e os dados internos da instituição, não há grandes desafios técnicos. No nosso caso, o processo é totalmente automatizado e flui de forma eficiente, desde o registo do financiamento até à comunicação dessa informação aos beneficiários. É possível ver isso em prática em vários exemplos — desde artigos que reconhecem o financiamento através dos Grant IDs da Crossref até ao reconhecimento do apoio financeiro nos sites dos centros de investigação.

Se pudesse alterar algo no GLS ou na forma como os metadados dos subsídios que regista são utilizados, o que seria?

Se pudéssemos mudar algo no Grant Linking System ou na forma como os metadados de financiamento são utilizados, gostaríamos de ter acesso a uma visualização interativa que mostrasse quantas produções científicas estão ligadas a cada financiamento e como esses se relacionam com outras entidades e objetos. Isso permitiria compreender de forma muito mais clara o impacto real dos financiamentos.

Gostaríamos também de ver uma melhor integração entre a Crossref e o ORCID no que respeita aos financiamentos — tal como já acontece com as publicações. Idealmente, quando um financiamento fosse registado e associado a um investigador, este seria notificado e poderia adicioná-lo facilmente ao seu registo ORCID. Assim, a informação fluiria automaticamente para o currículo nacional via PTCRISsync, garantindo consistência e reduzindo o trabalho manual.

Agradecemos à Cátia Laranjeira e à FCT|FCCN por partilharem a sua perspetiva e longa experiência neste domínio. A sua experiência destaca o papel que os metadados de financiamento desempenham num ecossistema de investigação e financiamento interligado e completo.

Connecting the dots: FWFs transition to linked grant metadata to support a thriving culture of openness

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the version in German

As a new Community Engagement Manager at Crossref, dedicated to working with the funders community, I frequently hear requests for examples and case studies of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) by ‘funders like us’. This has spurred me to start a series of blog posts presenting funders’ perspectives on joining Crossref and using our system – to demonstrate how it’s done.

In the first case study of a series, I speak with Katharina Rieck, Open Science Manager at the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austria’s national funding agency for basic research, about the agency’s approach to research metadata, transparency and openness, and the role that the Grant Linking System plays in it.

With a strong track record in Open Access and Open Science, the FWF’s decision to implement grant IDs represents more than a mere technical upgrade. What began as an initiative to enhance the openness and interoperability of grant information illustrates that truly open research infrastructure is not solely a matter of systems, but about people, policies and collaboration.

Katharina was also elected to the Crossref Board at our November 2024 Annual Meeting, and started her three-year term in January 2025.

Could you introduce your organisation? And what is your role?

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) is Austria’s national funding agency for basic research. The FWF funds all disciplines, from Social Sciences and Humanities to Life Sciences and Natural Sciences and Technology. As Open Science Manager, I am responsible for developing the FWF’s Open Science strategy, including the development of the Open Access Policy for Peer-Reviewed Publications, the Open Access Policy for Research Data as well as the FWF Research Data Management Policy. I am also responsible for the development and implementation of funding instruments such as the FWF Open-Access Block Grant and support for Open Science infrastructures.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

For more than two decades, the FWF has actively promoted and supported various aspects of Open Science. In 2004, it published its first Open Access Policy, making it one of the first funding organizations worldwide to adopt an Open Access policy for publications. In line with the commitment to open research information as a core pillar of Open Science, the FWF has taken further steps to strengthen openness and transparency: it joined Crossref to register grant DOIs and became a signatory of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information and joined Crossref to register grant DOIs.

While funding metadata––information about projects funded by the FWF––has long been freely available on our website, the launch of the Research Radar in 2023 marked a significant step forward. Our goal was not only to maintain accessibility but to ensure that the data published in the Research Radar is interoperable and aligned with the FAIR principles. By implementing the Grant Linking System from Crossref, we assign each FWF funded project a unique, persistent identifier with associated metadata, helping to make FWF grant information open, interoperable and sustainable.

Can you tell us about your experience using the Grant Linking System?

We have been using the Grant Linking System since November 2023. With the launch of the FWF’s new website and the introduction of the Research Radar, we began registering Crossref grant IDs (DOIs) for all grants included in the Research Radar database. As a result, all FWF-funded projects dating back to 1995 are now uniquely identifiable. The process of registering grant metadata with Crossref is straightforward, and we have set up a smooth internal workflow that enables the registration of DOIs after the FWF’s funding decision.

It is important to note that implementing Crossref grant IDs involved more than just a technical setup––it required the development of new internal processes and coordination through a dedicated Crossref grant DOI implementation group. The implementation process also resulted in a revised structure for grant numbers (DOI suffixes) for FWF-funded projects, establishing a sustainable and future-proof system.

How was your journey to socialise the Grant Linking System within your research community? How did you communicate the importance of identifiers and grant metadata to your grant holders?

The introduction of grant DOIs was supported by a comprehensive communication strategy, including dedicated online resources (e.g., New Identification Numbers for FWF Projects –– FWF), updates across multiple pages of the FWF website (such as Carrying out Your Project –– FWF), and presentations at various events. This communication strategy aimed to explain the purpose and value of the “new numbers” ensuring that researchers and stakeholders understood how this contributes to greater visibility, traceability, and openness of funded research.

As a funding organisation, we require grant recipients to acknowledge FWF support in all research outputs resulting from their projects. With the integration of grant DOIs into FWF’s metadata, the standardised acknowledgment text was updated to ensure that the DOIs are now included in outputs. The new required wording is: ‘This research was funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant DOI],’ and is now a requirement in the FWF funding agreement. Including the grant DOI both in the output metadata and the acknowledgment text enhances traceability and supports more effective analysis of FWF-funded outputs.

What do you find useful about registering grant metadata with Crossref?

One of the key benefits of registering grant metadata is the enhanced interconnectivity and the unique identification of FWF’s grant information. By registering our grants with Crossref, funding information becomes more than just information on the FWF website––it becomes interoperable data that is accessible and reusable. This not only increases visibility but also enables us to better analyse the outcomes of funded projects and ensures that the data is accessible as well as (re)usable by the broader research community.

In addition to assigning Crossref Grant IDs and registering grant metadata, the FWF has required ORCID IDs for researchers since 2016 and mandates the use of ROR IDs for institutions. The consistent use of persistent identifiers in metadata ensures the interoperability of FWF grant information and facilitates seamless integration with external data sources.

What are your hopes for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general?

The FAIRness and openness of research information––including metadata on funding information, research outputs, researchers, and institutions––are fundamental to a well-functioning research ecosystem. I hope to see a broader adoption of persistent identifiers in metadata, particularly in grant information, as well as a broader commitment to openly sharing research information as expressed in the Barcelona Declaration. Moreover, a key objective should be to ensure the highest possible accuracy of metadata at the point of entry. This entails, for instance, that publication metadata accurately includes funding metadata.

What were the key challenges you encountered when embracing the GLS, and how did you overcome them?

One of the key challenges we encountered when adopting the GLS was ensuring seamless integration in our existing IT infrastructure and workflows. Integrating the new number across different systems required considerable coordination. We overcame this challenge by establishing a dedicated implementation team that included IT experts.

Another challenge involved communicating and disseminating information regarding the grant DOI, ensuring that researchers and other relevant stakeholders were adequately informed. This was successfully managed through targeted and comprehensive communication efforts.

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other research funders?

It is important to recognise that registering grant identifers and metadata goes beyond a mere technical implementation. This is an opportunity to engage with diverse stakeholders, rethink processes and highlight the value of open funding metadata for the entire research community.

We are grateful to Katharina Rieck and FWF for generously sharing their insights and know-how. Their experience highlights the importance of seeing metadata not just as information, but as a shared resource that connects and empowers the research community.

Version in German

The title has been changed slightly from the original version. Translation by Lena Stoll.

Connecting the Dots: Wie der FWF durch die Umstellung auf vernetzte Fördermetadaten eine Kultur der Offenheit fördert

Als neue Community-Engagement-Managerin bei Crossref, die sich der Zusammenarbeit mit Fördergebern widmet, werde ich häufig gefragt, ob ich Beispiele und Fallstudien von „Förderern wie uns“ geben kann, die Crossrefs Grant Linking System (GLS) bereits eingeführt haben. Dies hat mich dazu veranlasst, eine Blogreihe zu starten, in der ich die Perspektiven von Fördergebern auf eine Crossref-Mitgliedschaft und die Nutzung unseres Systems vorstelle – um zu zeigen, wie es funktioniert.

In der ersten Fallstudie dieser Reihe spreche ich mit Katharina Rieck, Open-Science-Managerin beim Österreichischen Wissenschaftsfonds FWF, Österreichs nationaler Förderagentur für Grundlagenforschung, über den Ansatz des FWF zu Forschungsmetadaten, Transparenz und Offenheit sowie über die Rolle, die das Grant Linking System dabei spielt.

Mit seiner langjährigen Erfahrung im Bereich Open Access und Open Science stellt die Entscheidung des FWF, Grant-IDs (DOIs für Fördermittel) einzuführen, mehr als nur eine technische Verbesserung dar. Die Initiative begann mit dem Ziel, die Offenheit und Interoperabilität von Förderinformationen zu verbessern, aber schon bald wurde klar, dass eine wirklich offene Forschungsinfrastruktur nicht nur eine Frage der Systeme ist, sondern auch Menschen, Regelwerke, Abläufe und die Zusammenarbeit betrifft.

Katharina Rieck wurde auf unserer Jahresversammlung im November 2024 außerdem in Crossrefs Board of Directors gewählt und ist im Januar 2025 ihre dreijährige Amtszeit angetreten.

Bitte stellen Sie den FWF kurz vor und erklären Sie unseren Leser:innen, was Ihre Rolle dort ist.

Der Österreichische Wissenschaftsfonds FWF ist Österreichs nationale Förderorganisation für Grundlagenforschung. Der FWF fördert alle Disziplinen, von den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften über die Lebenswissenschaften bis hin zu Naturwissenschaften und Technik. Als Open-Science-Managerin bin ich für die Entwicklung der Open-Science-Strategie des FWF verantwortlich, einschließlich der Entwicklung der Open-Access-Policy für begutachtete Publikationen, der Open-Access-Policy für Forschungsdaten sowie der FWF-Richtlinie zum Forschungsdatenmanagement. Darüber hinaus bin ich verantwortlich für die Entwicklung und Umsetzung von Förderinstrumenten wie der Open-Access-Pauschale des FWF sowie die Unterstützung von Open-Science-Infrastrukturen.

Was hat Sie dazu bewogen, Crossref beizutreten?

Der FWF fördert und unterstützt seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten aktiv verschiedene Aspekte von Open Science. 2004 veröffentlichte er seine erste Open-Access-Policy und war damit eine der ersten Förderorganisationen weltweit, die eine Open-Access-Policy für Publikationen eingeführt haben. Im Einklang mit seinem Engagement für offene Forschungsinformationen als zentrale Säule von Open Science hat der FWF weitere Schritte unternommen, um Offenheit und Transparenz zu stärken: Der FWF ist Crossref beigetreten, um Grant-DOIs zu registrieren, und ist Unterzeichner der Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information.

Zwar sind Metadaten zur Forschungsförderung – also Informationen über FWF-geförderte Projekte – schon seit Langem über unsere Website frei verfügbar. Doch die Einführung des Research Radar im Jahr 2023 war nochmal ein bedeutender Fortschritt. Unser Ziel war es nicht nur, den offenen Zugang zu den Metadaten aufrechtzuerhalten, sondern auch sicherzustellen, dass die im Forschungsradar veröffentlichten Daten interoperabel und mit den FAIR-Prinzipien vereinbar sind. Durch die Anwendung von Crossrefs Grant Linking System bekommt jetzt jedes vom FWF geförderte Projekt eine eindeutige, unveränderliche ID mit dazugehörigen Metadaten – und die Informationen zu FWF-Fördermitteln sind somit offen, interoperabel und nachhaltig verfügbar.

Können Sie uns mehr über Ihre Erfahrungen mit dem Grant Linking System erzählen?

Wir nutzen das Grant Linking System seit November 2023. Mit dem Launch der neuen FWF-Website und des Research Radar begannen wir damit, Crossref-Grant-IDs (DOIs) für alle in der Forschungsradar-Datenbank enthaltenen Förderungen zu registrieren. Dadurch sind nun alle FWF-geförderten Projekte seit 1995 eindeutig identifizierbar. Die Registrierung von Grant-Metadaten bei Crossref ist unkompliziert, und wir haben einen reibungslosen internen Workflow entwickelt, um DOIs nach der Förderentscheidung des FWF zu registrieren.

Es ist wichtig zu erwähnen, dass es für die Einführung von Crossref-Grant-IDs mehr als nur den Aufbau technischer Prozesse brauchte – wir haben auch neue interne Abläufe entwickelt und eine eigene Arbeitsgruppe für die Koordination von Crossref-Grant-DOIs gebildet. Im Zuge dieses Prozesses haben wir auch die Struktur der Projektnummern für FWF-geförderte Projekte (also der DOI-Suffixe) überarbeitet und somit ein nachhaltiges und zukunftssicheres System aufgebaut.

Welche Erfahrungen haben Sie damit gemacht, das Grant Linking System in Ihrer Forschungscommunity zu bewerben? Wie haben Sie Ihren Fördernehmer:innen die Wichtigkeit von Identifiern und Metadaten vermittelt?

Wir haben die Einführung der Grant-DOIs mit einer umfassenden Kommunikationsstrategie unterstützt, inklusive spezieller Online-Ressourcen (z. B. Neue Identifikationsnummern für FWF-Projekte), der Aktualisierung mehrerer Seiten auf der FWF-Website (z. B. Projekt durchführen) sowie Vorträgen bei diversen Veranstaltungen. Ziel dieser Kommunikationsstrategie war es, Zweck und Nutzen der „neuen Nummern“ zu erläutern und sicherzustellen, dass Forschende und Stakeholder verstehen, wie diese zu mehr Sichtbarkeit, Nachvollziehbarkeit und Offenheit der geförderten Forschung beitragen.

Als Förderorganisation verlangen wir von unseren Fördernehmer:innen, die Unterstützung durch den FWF in allen Forschungsergebnissen zu erwähnen, die aus dem Projekt resultieren. Mit der Integration der Grant-DOIs in die Metadaten des FWF haben wir den standardisierten Acknowledgement-Text aktualisiert, um sicherzustellen, dass die DOIs in den Ergebnissen erwähnt werden. Der neue erforderliche Wortlaut ist: „Diese Forschung wurde gänzlich oder teilweise durch den Wissenschaftsfonds FWF finanziert [Grant-DOI].“ und ist in jedem FWF-Fördervertrag festgeschrieben. Die Angabe von Grant-DOIs sowohl in den Metadaten als auch im Acknowledgement-Text von wissenschaftlichem Output verbessert die Rückverfolgbarkeit und ermöglicht eine genauere Analyse der vom FWF geförderten Ergebnisse.

Was finden Sie an der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten bei Crossref am hilfreichsten?

Einer der Hauptvorteile der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten ist die verbesserte Vernetzung und die eindeutige Identifizierung der Förderinformationen des FWF. Durch die Registrierung unserer Projekte bei Crossref werden Förderinformationen zu mehr als nur Informationen auf unserer Website – sie werden zu interoperablen Daten, die abrufbar und wiederverwendbar sind. Dies erhöht nicht nur die Sichtbarkeit, sondern ermöglicht uns auch eine bessere Analyse der Ergebnisse geförderter Projekte und stellt sicher, dass die Daten für die allgemeine Forschungsgemeinschaft zugänglich und (wieder-)verwendbar sind.

Neben der Vergabe von Crossref-Grant-IDs und der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten schreibt der FWF seit 2016 ORCID für Forschende sowie die Verwendung von ROR IDs für Institutionen vor. Die konsequente Verwendung persistenter IDs in den Metadaten gewährleistet die Interoperabilität der FWF-Förderinformationen und erleichtert die nahtlose Integration mit externen Datenquellen.

Was erhoffen Sie sich vom GLS und von mehr Transparenz bei Fördermetadaten im Allgemeinen?

Die FAIRness und Offenheit von Forschungsinformationen – einschließlich der Metadaten zu Förderinformationen, Forschungsergebnissen, Forschenden und Institutionen – sind für ein gut funktionierendes Forschungsökosystem wesentlich. Ich hoffe auf eine weiterreichende Anwendung von persistenten IDs in Metadaten, insbesondere in Förderinformationen, und auf ein größeres Engagement für den offenen Austausch von Forschungsinformationen, wie es zum Beispiel in der Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information gefordert wird. Darüber hinaus sollte sichergestellt werden, dass die Metadaten bereits bei der Eingabe und damit bei ihrer Generierung möglichst korrekt sind. Das bedeutet unter anderem, dass die Metadaten von Publikationen die korrekten Fördermetadaten enthalten sollten.

Welche Herausforderungen sind bei der Einführung des GLS aufgetreten und wie haben Sie diese gemeistert?

Eine der größten Herausforderungen bestand darin, das Grant Linking System nahtlos in unsere bestehende IT-Infrastruktur und Arbeitsabläufe zu integrieren. Die „neue Nummer“ in die unterschiedlichen Systeme zu integrieren, bedeutete einen hohen Koordinationsaufwand. Gemeistert haben wir diese Herausforderung durch die Bildung einer eigenen Arbeitsgruppe für die Anwendung von Crossref-Grant-DOIs, in der auch IT-Expert:innen vertreten waren.

Eine weitere Herausforderung bestand in der Kommunikation und Verbreitung von Informationen zu Grant-DOIs, um Forschende und andere Stakeholder angemessen zu informieren. Das haben wir durch gezielte und umfassende Kommunikationsmaßnahmen erreicht.

Basierend auf Ihrer eigenen Erfahrung, welchen Ratschlag würden Sie Kolleg:innen bei anderen Fördergebern mitgeben?

Es ist wichtig zu verstehen, dass die Registrierung von Grant-IDs und Metadaten über eine bloße technische Umsetzung hinausgeht. Der Prozess bietet die Gelegenheit, mit verschiedenen Stakeholdern in Kontakt zu treten, Abläufe zu überdenken und den Wert offener Fördermetadaten für die gesamte Forschungsgemeinschaft zu unterstreichen.

Wir danken Katharina Rieck und dem FWF für ihre Bereitschaft, ihre Erkenntnisse und ihr Know-how so großzügig zu teilen. Ihr Erfahrungsbericht hat uns gezeigt, wie wichtig es ist, Metadaten nicht nur als Informationen zu betrachten, sondern als eine gemeinsame Ressource, die die gesamte Forschungsgemeinschaft vernetzen und stärken kann.

Celebrating five years of Grant IDs: where are we with the Crossref Grant Linking System?

Kornelia Korzec — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure.

The system includes a funder-designed metadata schema and a unique link for each award which enables connections with millions of research outputs, better reporting on the research and outcomes of funding, and a contribution to open science infrastructure. Our first activity to highlight the moment was to host a community call last week where around 30 existing and potential funder members joined to discuss the benefits and the steps to take to participate in the Grant Linking System (GLS).

Some organisations at the forefront of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System presented their challenges and how they overcame them, shared the benefits they are reaping from participating, and provided some tips about their processes and workflows.

The funding organisations whose experiences were shared included Wellcome, FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal), and NWO (Dutch Research Council). They were joined by a new group of foundations, research councils, and private research funders from around the world—from Kenya to Singapore to Estonia—to have a first introduction to the GLS and connect them with colleagues who are further along on their journey.

We also heard about tools such as a new open source Crossref plugin for the Fluxx platform, grant management systems with in-built Crossref integrations such as ProposalCentral, Europe PMC GrantFinder which was first to implement the GLS on Wellcome’s behalf and hosts their grants, and one of the first publishers, eLife to start referencing Crossref grant links in their publications both online and in the open metadata for others to retrieve.

Read on for further information or watch the recording of the event.

What is the Crossref Grant Linking System?

The Crossref Grant Linking System, conceptualised in 2017, and launched in 2019, captures and helps clarify funding relationships for scholarly outputs. Thanks to interconnectedness with the 160 million metadata records collected and curated by Crossref members, it enables funders as well as scholars to track and analyse funding patterns and evaluate programmes, and it supports assertions about the integrity of scholarly records.

Features of the GLS

Globally unique persistent link and identifier for each grant
Connected with 160 million published outputs
Funder-designed metadata schema, including project, investigator, value, and award-type information
Programmatic or no-code methods to send metadata
- Thanks to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who funded development of the online grant registration form
Open search and API for all to discover funding outcomes; all metadata is distributed openly to thousands of tools and services
Crossref-hosted landing pages
A global community of ~50 funder advisors and 35+ funders already in the Grant Linking System
Membership of Crossref; influence the foundational infrastructure powering open research

The last five years has seen the GLS grow through membership, metadata, and community contributions.

The momentum for this programme is building - as illustrated by increasing numbers of metadata records (and related relationships we’re seeing). The 35 funder members represent over 100 funding programmes and have created 125,000 grant records already.

During last week’s call, it was helpful to hear from the community what they see as key benefits of the Crossref Grant Linking System:

Meaningfully delivering on and supporting Open Science policies and mandates, and contributing ‘their bit’ to the transparency of the evidence trail in the scholarly ecosystem.
Reporting and evaluating the funding programmes, essential for the public funders who need to demonstrate the value for money in allocating their funds and other support.
Supporting a more holistic assessment of scholarship and scholars, especially as and when metadata becomes included with a full array of outputs, not limited to books and articles.

How the Crossref Grant Linking System supports Open Science policy

Since 2020, all the grant records are openly available through our REST API which is queried more than 1.8 billion times every month so these metadata records are distributed to thousands of systems across the research enteprise. In a 2022 blog, Ed Pentz and Ginny Hendricks laid out guidelines for research funders to meet open science guidelines using existing open infrastructure such as Crossref, ORCID, and ROR. Syman Stevens, a grantmaking and private philanthropy consultant, highlighted on the call that the funders he works with are increasingly interested in ways to deliver on their open science policy and that participation in the GLS is a tangible thing they can do to meet this goal.

As part of its open science policy, NWO will start participating in the Crossref Grant Linking System from July 2025. Research funders are a part of the scholarly communications system; we not only provide the funding to do the actual research but can also be the authoritative source of data about the projects we have funded and the outputs arising from that funding. Increasingly, all these elements – grants, researchers, outputs - are linked with metadata and unique identifiers to ensure that research is findable and accessible.

– Hans de Jonge, Director of Open Science NL, part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO)

How funders leverage the Grant Linking System in their reporting and assessment

Looking back to the origins of the system, it’s important to recognise the work of the initial working groups. Through their contribution, funders helped design the initial metadata schema for grants as well as establish the governance and fees for this service, and our Advisory Group continues to inform further developments. In this way, the Grant Linking System enables the needs and wishes of funders to contribute and see their data as part of the wider ecosystem.

An excellent example of that synergy in action is the use case presented by Cátia Laranjeira, manager of the PTCRIS programme at the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal (FCT). PTCRIS is the Foundation’s integrated national information ecosystem that supports scientific activity management. Cátia reflected on the relative fragmentation of spaces where the scientific outputs are found, and PTCRIS’s ambition for aggregating metadata in one place to be able to trace and evaluate programmes in light of the related outputs. At the start of the programme, they identified lack of a persistent identifier for grants as a major shortcoming of the system. Crossref GLS naturally fits in with their goals.

The initiative by FCT to assign unique DOIs to national public funding through Crossref is a game-changer for open science, linking funding directly to scientific outcomes and boosting transparency. Join us in this effort—let’s make every grant count and ensure open access to research information!"

– Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologis (FCT Portugal)

FCT initially piloted a small subset of their grants (approximately 6,000 recent awards) at the end of 2023. Cátia pointed to researchers’ keen participation in this programme as one of its successes – and thanks to the word of mouth, FCT has already been approached by researchers requesting unique Crossref links for their grants! This appetite for grant IDs will soon be more fully satisfied, as FCT is readying to register all of their grants with Crossref, to enable further insights into funding and outcome flows, supporting them in demonstrating the value for money for the public resources they manage. Via interfaces for grant management and standardised online CVs, the system is also enabling researchers to use the system in their own future reporting and career development.

In the ensuing discussion, Rachel Bruce of UKRI mentioned that she’s hopeful that GLS will help funders ‘close the loop’ on more holistic reward and recognition, allowing for inclusion of evidence for a broader set of outputs in those processes.

How the community is working to integrate open infrastructure

Melissa Harrison, Team Leader at EMBL-EBI, manages Europe PMC and a complementary data science team, who were part of the initial FREYA project – supporting infrastructure delivery for unique identifiers for grants. The team has been adding grant records to Crossref on Wellcome’s behalf since 2019. Melissa highlighted the shortcomings of internal award numbers, which don’t tend to be understood outside of the ecosystem where they are produced (that is the funder’s administrative system), are almost certainly not unique, and don’t resolve to or connect with anything in the wider ecosystem. Therefore internal award numbers can’t signify relationships with other outputs or assets in the wider world. By contrast, Crossref’s Grant IDs are unique, persistent, resolvable, and interrelated with other Crossref metadata, whilst being retrievable for other systems to link to too.

Persistent identifiers for grants was the next logical step after identifiers for funders - open metadata registered with a PID in a central service like Crossref is invaluable to build the full picture of the research enterprise.

– Melissa Harrison, Team Leader, Literature Services at EMBL-EBI)

Ease of execution is important for scaling the Grant Linking System, and enabling its use in a diverse set of circumstances in the open science ecosystem. Altum was the trailblazer, first integrating its grant management platform Proposal Central with GLS. It was good to hear that others are now joining the integration efforts. Syman Stevens talked about the recent work initiated by Joe McArthur at OA Works, to develop a simple, open-source plug-in for any of the major grant management systems, to enable funders to deposit their grant metadata with Crossref GLS with a click of the button. Syman demonstrated the resulting interface in Fluxx, that allows for creating a record and sending grant metadata to Crossref as part of the regular grant management within the platform. He pointed out that, while this integration was developed for Fluxx, all code and documentation is openly available on GitHub and this can potentially be forked or adapted as necessary for reuse in other grant management systems.

It is heartening that others in the community are seeing such a need for this that they’re funding and creating their own tools to advance participation and use of the GLS.

Finally, Fred Atherden, Head of Production Operations at eLife, presented how they include Crossref grant identifiers in publication metadata for the version of record of the works published on their platform. eLife is the first publisher to fully integrate Crossref grant identifiers both within the article display and in the metadata. Fred shared that in addition to collecting the data from the authors, eLife also attempts matching, albeit using very restrictive methodology, to enable more grant metadata in their publication records. They recognise that so far there are very few publishers including persistent links for grants in this way, and talked about plans to start collecting and including this data further upstream, and including them in the future for reviewed preprints.

Acknowledgements and how to participate in the GLS

Reflecting on the last five years, thanks must go to the >35 funders who are already participating (see logo mashup below), to our current volunteers and to those partners working to promote and make use of the Grant Linking System. We also acknowledge that the GLS would not have been possible without the Crossref board members at the time, our staff including alumni Josh Brown, Jennifer Kemp, Rachael Lammey, and Geoffrey Bilder, or without the early dedicated time and input from the following people and organisations on our working groups for governance and fees, and for metadata modelling:

Yasushi Ogasaka and Ritsuko Nakajima, Japan Science & Technology Agency
Neil Thakur and Brian Haugen, US National Institutes of Health
Jo McEntyre and Michael Parkin, Europe PMC
Robert Kiley and Nina Frentop, Wellcome
Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka and Diego Chialva, European Research Council
Lance Vowell and Carly Robinson, OSTI/US Dept of Energy
Ashley Moore and Kevin Dolby, UKRI (Research Councils UK / Medical Research Council)
Salvo da Rosa, Children’s Tumor Foundation
Trisha Cruse, DataCite

To learn more about the Crossref Grant Linking System, the best place to start is our service page. And for the next step, please reach out to us for a conversation about any questions specific to your organisation and any questions that may need to be addressed in order to enable your full participation.

Grant DOIs enhance the discovery and accessibility of funded project information and are one of the important links in a connected research ecosystem. I’m grateful and proud to contribute to the robustness and interconnectedness of the research infrastructure. Few funders are currently participating in the Crossref Grant Linking System, and I encourage others to consider doing so. This adoption follows the “network effect,” where the value and utility increase as more people participate, encouraging even wider adoption.

– Kristin Eldon Whylly, Senior Grants Manager and Change Management Lead at Templeton World Charity Fund (TWCF)

You can email me via feedback@crossref.org or set up a call with me when it suits you (you can overlay your own calendar using the toggle at the top right). We look forward to welcoming even more funders and to see those relationships in the open science infrastructure grow even further in the coming years.

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Amanda French — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is some overlap between the Open Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Open Funder Registry IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders when they appear in both registries. We aim to merge the two registries over time. We will ensure Crossref members can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Just yesterday, we published a summary of a recent workshop between funders and publishers on funding metadata workflows that we convened with the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Sesame Open Science. As the report notes, “open funding metadata is arguably the next big thing” [in Open Science]. That being the case, we think this is the ideal time to strengthen our support of open funding metadata by beginning the transition to ROR.

Comparing the features of ROR and the Open Funder Registry

Let’s look at some of the similarities and differences between the two registries, including their history, features, scope, and usage, since there are important nuances and distinctions that are helpful to understand.

Overview

ROR	Open Funder Registry
Launched in 2019	Launched in 2013
Primary use case is contributor affiliation	Primary use case is funding acknowledgement
105k+ records	35k+ records
CC0 data	CC0 data
REST API	REST API
Free to use	Free to use
Entire registry downloadable as JSON and CSV	Entire registry downloadable as RDF; funder names and IDs downloadable as CSV
Records contain mappings to other IDs	Records do not contain mappings to other IDs
few organisation relationships and hierarchy	multiple organisation relationships and hierarchy
organisation level with no funding programs/schemes	organisation level with some funding programs/schemes
8 organisation types	2 funder types, 8 funder subtypes
Open source code and multiple open-source tools available	Open source code
Web-based registry search	Web-based search for works in Crossref associated with each Open Funder Registry ID
Web-based landing pages for each ROR record	JSON landing pages for each Open Funder Registry record
Updated monthly	Updated bimonthly
Public curation process	Private curation process
Anyone can request changes and additions	Anyone can request changes and additions
Stable financial support (Crossref, DataCite, CDL)	Stable financial support (Crossref, Elsevier)
Beginning to be supported in funding and publishing workflows	Well supported in most funding and publishing workflows
Currently used by 260+ Crossref members ¹	Currently used by 2100+ Crossref members ²

History

The Open Funder Registry was launched as FundRef over a decade ago to enable the community to cite research funding and support and assert it within the scholarly record, acknowledging the organisations granting their support. Elsevier generously donated the seed data for the Open Funder Registry and has managed its curation for the last ten years, while we have maintained the technical operations and promoted community adoption of the Open Funder Registry.

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) was introduced in 2019 by the California Digital Library, DataCite, and Crossref to enable the community to cite contributor affiliations and assert them within the scholarly record, acknowledging the organisations that housed or performed the research. Digital Science generously donated the seed data for the Research Organization Registry from its Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) initiative, and Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library have contributed labour and resources to turn ROR into a mature, independent, freely available service.

Scope

One key difference between the registries is that ROR has always included funding organisations, and ROR records have always included mappings to Funder IDs where available, while the reverse is not true: the Open Funder Registry includes only funding organisations, not other kinds of organisations, and Open Funder Registry records do not currently include mappings to ROR IDs or other identifiers. It therefore makes sense to expand our initial contributor affiliation use case for ROR to include the identification of organisations that fund and support research.

Usage

More Crossref members use Funder IDs than use ROR IDs, to be sure. You can see from the table above that the number of Crossref members using Funder IDs in Crossref records is higher by almost a factor of 10 than the number of Crossref members using ROR IDs in Crossref records. But note too that the current rate of adoption is far higher for ROR than it is for the Open Funder Registry. Since January of 2022, we’ve seen a gratifying number of publishers and service providers beginning to use ROR identifiers for contributor affiliations in Crossref. In the last year, the number of Crossref members depositing ROR IDs has increased by 356%, while the number depositing Funder IDs has increased only by 12%. As evidenced by its ballooning API traffic, too, with more than 20 million requests last month,³ ROR is clearly being used by many scholarly research systems for many purposes. The more systems that use an identifier, the more valuable that identifier becomes as a vehicle for exchanging information.

ROR’s primary use case is to identify contributor affiliations and is already being used by funders. Nineteen funding organisations are depositing ROR IDs in their grant records with Crossref to denote principal investigator affiliations,⁴ and, following a meeting of the our Funder Advisory Group last month, all eighty funder members are primed to start using ROR IDs to identify themselves in grant records.

Tools and services

Both the Open Funder Registry and ROR have open data and open source code, but we think that our suite of free and open source utilities for ROR gives it an advantage. We know that publishers and their service providers have ongoing challenges in collecting and matching funding information from authors and in validating Funder IDs. With our extensive ROR toolkit, publishers and their technology providers who adopt ROR will be in a better position to improve the accuracy of funding acknowledgements in metadata, which can in turn enable the development of reliable analytics, tools, and services for funders, regulators, research facilities, and the public.

Crossref has built tools based on OpenRefine for both the Open Funder Registry and ROR: the Open Funder Registry Reconciliation Service and the ROR Reconciler are both useful ways to clean messy data. ROR, however, also offers a much-used API endpoint that helps match organisation names to ROR IDs, and several third parties have also developed and shared open source matching tools and services for ROR. Crossref is also collaborating on new strategies for affiliation matching that will improve connections for funding acknowledgements.

Community engagement models

The Open Funder Registry has been curated for over a decade through time and expertise generously donated by Elsevier and is community-governed by Crossref and it’s membership and board. ROR offers more transparent community involvement and is jointly governed by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library. ROR is openly curated and is aided by a global Curation Advisory Board of volunteers.

What will this mean for you?

The many organisations whose tools, services, and workflows have been architected to use Open Funder Registry (OFR) IDs will find this transition a challenge, and we don’t want to make light of that issue. Over the last ten years, we have encouraged the community to adopt Funder IDs, and the community has demonstrably recognized the benefits of doing so. Publishers have put a great deal of time, thought, and effort into collecting funder data and including it in Crossref metadata, and they have built internal reports and workflows around the Open Funder Registry. Crossref is committed to making the transition from the Open Funder Registry to the Research Organization Registry as simple as possible for the community.

If you are not already using the Open Funder Registry and are planning to begin standardizing funding data, we recommend that you use ROR to identify funders. If you are currently using the Open Funder Registry in your systems and workflows, don’t worry! In the medium term, Open Funder Registry IDs aren’t going away. Eventually, however, the Open Funder Registry may cease to be updated. Funder IDs and their mapping to ROR IDs will be maintained, so if Crossref members submit a Funder ID, it will get mapped to a ROR ID automatically. Note, too, that Crossref is committed to maintaining the current funder API endpoints.

In short, if you are already using Funder IDs, you can and should continue to do so. However, we do recommend that you begin looking at what it will take to integrate ROR into your systems and workflows for identifying funders as well as affiliations.

We face challenges in this transition, too. Of these, we think the largest will be (1) completing the reconciliation work involved in mapping Funder IDs to ROR IDs, and (2) updating Crossref’s schemas, APIs, and deposit tools to support ROR IDs in many the ways we currently support Funder IDs. We’ll discuss both of these challenges in future blog posts.

Tell us what you need?

We want to hear from you. You can use our Community Forum talk to us about the Crossref Open Funder Registry or contact ROR staff at Crossref via our request form. You can attend online Crossref events, including ROR-specific webinars to get updates from us and ask us your questions.

One of the major messages we’re already hearing from funders and publishers is expressed in yesterday’s post on open funding metadata: “While many concluded that there was still a long way to go to solve the many technical challenges related to funding metadata, attendees were unanimous on its importance.” We look forward to beginning this important work together.

Open funding metadata through Crossref; a workshop to discuss challenges and improving workflows

Hans de Jonge — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ten years on from the launch of the Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef), there is renewed interest in the potential of openly available funding metadata through Crossref. And with that: calls to improve the quality and completeness of that data. Currently, about 25% of Crossref records contain some kind of funding information. Over the years, this figure has grown steadily. A number of recent publications have shown, however, that there is considerable variation in the extent to which publishers deposit these data to Crossref. Technical but also business issues seem to lie at the root of this. Crossref - in close collaboration with the Dutch Research Council NWO and Sesame Open Science - brought together a group of 26 organisations from across the ecosystem to discuss the barriers and possible solutions. This blog presents some anonymized lessons learned.

There is no Open Science without open metadata

The interest in the potential of this open-source funding metadata seems to be entering a new stage. When registering (or updating) a DOI record for a publication, publishers can include information about the funding of the research. The Open Funder Registry grew out of recommendations in the report from the US Scholarly Publishing Roundtable in 2010. During the Annual Meeting of Crossref that year, Frederick Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, argued that in order to make research funding information in publications accessible, it needed to be presented in a standard way and stored in a central location.

The benefits of having open funding metadata available, listed by Dylla in his presentation 13 years ago, are still very valid:

Researchers benefit because it increases transparency of their funding sources and supports the requirements they already have from their funders.
For funders, having this data available is essential because it allows them to identify the published outcomes of publicly funded research. Essential to monitor compliance with open access policies, but also important given the pressures funders face to account for their spending of public money.
For publishers, funding metadata provides a valuable service, as it provides insight into how the research they publish is funded.

Although Crossref has been collating funding metadata for many years, there seems to be a renewed interest in this service. Publishers have long expressed a desire to solve the challenges, meta-researchers need this information in order to analyze research on research, editors are concerned with research integrity, including funding trends, and funders themselves need to track the reach and return of their support.

Open Science seems to be an important driver: As we move to an ecosystem built on Open Science principles, not only publications, data, and software need to be openly available, but also the metadata associated with those scholarly outputs. Indeed, in an Open Science world, all meta information should be open, and academia should not be dependent anymore on data from proprietary bibliographic databases. Indicators for research assessment and policy development should be open indicators, derived from open metadata. Much has been done in this area already, in the context of Open Citations and Open Abstracts. While many in the community have focused on the bigger picture of advocating for all open metadata, e.g. Metadata 20/20, open funding metadata is arguably the next big thing. Open Research Information, including open metadata, must be a strategic priority for science and society.

Room for improvement

After ten years of collecting funding metadata, 25% of records in Crossref contain some kind of funding information, and this figure was reached by a steady growth over that time. A number of recent studies have shown, however, that there is room for improvement. A case study published by two of the present authors has shown that the extent to which publishers deposit funding information to Crossref varies considerably. Some larger society presses - American Chemical Society (ACS), American Physical Society (APS), and Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) - perform exceptionally well, with almost 100% of publications containing funding information. But there is still a large number of publishers - among them large legacy publishers - that attain substantially lower figures or do not seem to deposit funding metadata at all. Our case study has shown that often this cannot be explained by the fact that authors have not provided any funding information, as often this information is available in the acknowledgement sections of the papers. Somehow, however, this data does not find its way to Crossref.

Workflows and challenges: collect, retain, validate, deposit

In order to chart the challenges that publishers face when collecting this information, we organized a roundtable session. 26 organisations were invited from across the ecosystem. These included: major publishers (American Chemical Society, British Medical Journal, Elsevier, IOP Publishing, PLOS, Royal Society of Chemistry, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley), funders (European Research Council, Austrian Research Council, Dutch Research Council, OSTI-DOE, UKRI, and Michael J Fox Foundation) as well as service providers (Aries Editorial Manager, PKP / OJS, Scholastica, and eJournal Press).

In order to map the potential barriers and challenges publishers face, participants were presented with a workflow scheme representing a hypothetical production process.

This workflow outlined the steps in the production process at which funder information would potentially be handled, as well as some of the considerations that might be at play at each step.

collecting funder information (upon submission or acceptance)
extracting funder information from full text
retaining funder information through the production workflow
including funder information in article metadata
making metadata and/or full text available for indexing

Participants were invited to comment on this workflow and place digital dots in the scheme to identify challenges in the collection, retention, and deposit of funding information. These pain points were afterwards fleshed out in break-out groups.

Lessons learned

1. Still a lack of awareness among editors and authors

For many journals and publishers, collecting funding information starts when papers are submitted through submission systems. Many publishers use the same systems: ScholarOne and Editorial Manager, though many have multiple systems in place for different portfolios of journals. Around 25,000 journals use PKP’s Open Journal System, and Scholastica and eJournal Press are growing in popularity and importance. All of them provide the possibility for authors to enter funder information but this does not by all means mean that all journals make use of it. Submission systems are highly customizable, and publishers tend to tailor systems to the needs and wishes of their journals. Editors who do not see much value in collecting funding metadata therefore present a first ‘weak link’. Publishers and tech providers agreed that more outreach is needed about the importance of funding metadata among editors and authors.

2. Improvements are needed in submission systems

Where journals and publishers agree on asking authors to register funding information through the submission systems, many express a tension between collecting structured metadata and making it as easy as possible for authors. Many are hesitant to use mandatory input fields. Instead, funding metadata is often collected as free text, giving rise to a plethora of ambiguities. Most systems provide suggestions based on the input of the author based on the Open Funder Registry. A lot seems to go wrong at this stage. Authors often persist in the wrong spelling of their funder and do not choose predefined suggestions, making it very difficult to match input to Funder IDs. Publishers estimated the number of non-matches up to 50%. Trivial issues like “Bill & Melinda” versus “Bill and Melinda” or “Netherlands organisation” versus “Netherlands Organisation” result in errors. Here, autocomplete techniques seem to be in dire need of improvement. Based on a preliminary analysis of funder name variants used in Crossref, adding up to 3 of the most frequently used name variants to the list of ‘alternative funder names’ in the Funder registry could solve around 60% of missed matches.

3. A lot can be learned from how some publishers have changed and organized their workflows

Faced with these issues, the Royal Society of Chemistry has invested in innovative workflows to enhance the availability of funding metadata. Instead of relying solely on the free text input of the authors, RSC presented to the group the details of how they have tackled the issue. In addition to author-provided acknowledgements, they work with third-party production vendors to programmatically extract information from the acknowledgement section of papers. Data from the two sources are compared, and when differences or conflicts are being noted, the data is fixed, completed, and reformatted. The next step is crucial - the newly-cleansed funding data is fed back to the author for validation, and retained during the production phase of the paper. Implementation of this validation stage has increased the availability of funding metadata by 30%. In 2023 80% of papers published by RSC have some kind of structured funding metadata. An additional benefit of this feedback loop was its educational effect by alerting authors to the importance of correct funding information. But even RSC continues to struggle with issues of funder name ambiguity, use of acronyms, authors reporting grant or award names instead of funder names, issues with phraseology of funding acknowledgements, and frustrations with the user experience of the service provider integrations with the OFR.

Many publishers agreed that collecting funding information from full-text papers is the preferred option. Not only because it lowers the burden for authors, but also because this potentially renders better data as this is where authors are expected to include this information as part of their funder’s commitments.

4. Retaining information and submitting: no big deal

At the beginning of the workshop, it was expected that maybe the retention of funding information and the propagation through various interlinked systems might pose problems for publishers. However, this was not identified as a problem by participants. Nor was there mention of any challenges in depositing information to Crossref, nor of downstream databases having difficulties retrieving the metadata.

5. There is a genuine interest across the ecosystem to improve funding information in Crossref

While many concluded that there was still a long way to go to solve the many technical challenges related to funding metadata, attendees were unanimous on its importance. Participants agreed that these improvements would require investments from publishers. A willingness to do those was expressed, but also a sense that publishers who do should be incentivised for it, maybe as part of the agreements they have with library consortia. JISC’s recent contract with Taylor & Francis (page 164, Section 7a (iii)) is a good example of how consortia can successfully negotiate the supply of high quality metadata, including funding metadata. It was agreed that another solution could be to allow the additional deposit of the free-text acknowledgement section as a metadata field in Crossref. Instead of educating authors to enter their data correctly or relying on publishers and tech providers to improve their systems to turn free text funder acknowledgement text to structured data, text mining and machine learning could facilitate the improvement of this data.

Next steps

For this workshop, we concentrated on the collection and registration of funding metadata by publishers and did not go into the important, related, issue of the Crossref Grant Linking System (Grant IDs) nor of the plans to further align funder IDs with ROR IDs, both projects that help the community to better record funding information.

Next steps resulting from this community workshop, as

Funders are encouraged to join and register their grants with Crossref DOIs so that registered grants can in future be linked directly to publications and other outputs. About 50 funders have already created around 90,000 grant records. The more grant DOIs that are created by funders, the more likely publishers will be able to prioritize collecting them in their own publication metadata.
Publishers are encouraged to work with their service providers to prioritize the quality of the open funding metadata through Crossref, which is a source for downstream analyses and inclusion by many thousands of tools and services.
Other stakeholders are also offering opportunities to focus on funding metadata, showing a growing interest in the completeness of funder metadata. For example, OA Switchboard’s funder pilot, which also looks at the potential to feed enriched metadata back to Crossref to make them publicly available, and the Open Research Funder Group’s work to promote the improvement of tracking research output, including funding metadata, which includes an active working group in this area.
Crossref will continue to work with publishers and service providers to encourage and make it easier to include funder information in article metadata, including the use of grant identifiers and funder identifiers. Work is underway to bring the Open Funder Registry closer to ROR (Research Organization Registry), and is planning, at some point in the future, to merge the OFR into ROR, as ROR has a much wider scope and is more broadly community-governed. Crossref has also begun some work on collecting ROR IDs where we currently collect Funder IDs. More technical information is available in this ticket).

We would like to thank all the participants of the workshop for their openness and commitment to working through these issues together. It was a rare opportunity to share insights from publishers, service providers, funders, and researchers - and a useful first step in co-creating a shared understanding of the challenges and charting a path forward.

Guide for funders to support FAIR workflows & enable research tracking

Helena Cousijn — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Guide for funders to support FAIR workflows & enable research tracking

Published in August 2023 as part of the Implementing FAIR Workflows project, this Guide is a joint publication by three open scholarly infrastructure organisations—Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID. It introduces the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and open metadata in facilitating open and FAIR research, and walks funders through concrete ways to engage: committing resources, enacting congruent policies, and providing support around grant application, management, and reporting.

Strategists

Understand why funder participation in the PID and metadata infrastructure matters. Persistent identifiers and open metadata are what connect grants to the research outputs, people, and organisations they support—enabling assessment, discovery, and long-term stewardship of the record.

Decision-makers

See what policy and resourcing decisions align a funder with the wider ecosystem. The Guide sets out recommendations funders can adopt—from PID and metadata requirements in grant conditions, to committing to the community-owned infrastructure that maintains those records.

Practitioners

Apply the recommendations across grant application, management, and reporting. Concrete workflow guidance for embedding Crossref grant IDs, DataCite dataset/software IDs, and ORCID researcher IDs across the funder’s own systems and reporting pipelines.

What this guide covers

Why PIDs and metadata matter for funders—from grant lifecycle tracking to open-science impact assessment
The three infrastructure organisations’ complementary roles—Crossref for scholarly works and grant records, DataCite for data and software, ORCID for researchers and contributors
Policy recommendations funders can adopt to align with the wider open scholarly ecosystem
Practical workflow steps for grant application, management, and reporting
Community investment—how funders can support the community-owned infrastructure that makes end-to-end research tracking possible

About the Implementing FAIR Workflows project

Implementing FAIR Workflows is a three-year project delivering exemplar FAIR workflows in cognitive neuroscience research, built on the existing PID and metadata infrastructure. This Guide is one of the project’s community-facing outputs, developed by the DataCite project team in collaboration with Crossref and ORCID.

Read the guide

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The more the merrier, or how more registered grants means more relationships with outputs

Dominika Tkaczyk — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of the main motivators for funders registering grants with Crossref is to simplify the process of research reporting with more automatic matching of research outputs to specific awards. In March 2022, we developed a simple approach for linking grants to research outputs and analysed how many such relationships could be established. In January 2023, we repeated this analysis to see how the situation changed within ten months. Interested? Read on!

TL;DR

The overall numbers changed a lot between March 2022 and January 2023:
- the total number of registered grants doubled (from ~38k to ~76k)
- the total numbers of relationships established between grants and research outputs quadrupled (from 21k to 92k)
- the percentage of linked grants increased substantially (from 10% to 23%)
Most of this growth can be attributed to one funder, the European Union. They started registering grants with us in December 2022, and:
- their grants constitute 47% of all grants registered by January 2023 and 95% of grants registered between March 2022 and January 2023
- 72% of all established relationships involve their grants
We have further work planned both internally and with the community to consolidate and build out important relationships between funding and research outputs.

Introduction

When we started to develop, think and talk about grant registration at Crossref back in 2017, one of the key things we expected this to support was easier, more efficient, accurate analysis of research outputs funded by specific awards.

This is backed up by conversations with funders who are keen to fill in gaps in the map of the research landscape with new data points and better quality information, search for grants, investigators, projects or organisations associated with awards and simplify the process of research reporting and with automatic matching of outputs to grants.

This is in keeping with and informed our recent recommendations about how funding agencies can meet open science guidance using existing open infrastructure, which included input from ORCID and DataCite. It’s also in keeping with recent studies on how important funding and grant metadata is to help the community use this information in their own research.

To meet these expectations, we need not only identifiers and metadata of grants, but also relationships between them and research outputs supported by them. Unfortunately, our schema does not make it easy to directly deposit such relationships, and so there are only a handful of them available. But we wouldn’t let such a minor obstacle stop us! In March 2022 we analysed the metadata of registered grants and developed a simple matching approach to automatically link grants to research outputs supported by them. Back then, we were able to find 20,834 relationships, involving 17,082 research outputs and 3,858 grants (which was 10% of all registered grants).

Now that we are seeing the accumulation of grant metadata being registered with Crossref, we have a bigger dataset to test these expectations against than we did a year ago. So we decided to do the analysis again. And the results are in, they’re open, and they’re positive. We’ll explain below.

The methodology

To spare you from having to read the old analysis in detail, here is a very brief summary of the matching methodology. To find relationships between grants and research outputs, we iterated over all registered grants, and for each grant we searched for research outputs that looked like they might have been supported by this grant. We established a relationship between a grant and a research output if one of the following three scenarios was true:

The research output contained the DOI of the grant (deposited as the award number).
The award number in the grant was the same as the award number in the research output, the research output contained the funder ID, and one of the following was true:
a. Funder ID in the grant was the same as the funder ID in the research output
b. Funder ID in the grant replaced or was replaced by the funder ID in the research output
c. Funder ID in the grant was an ancestor or the descendant of the funder ID in the research output
The award number in the grant was the same as the award number in the research output, the research output did not contain the funder ID, and one of the following was true:
a. Funder name in the research output was the same as the funder name in the grant
b. Funder name in the research output was the same as the name of a funder that replaced or was replaced by the funder in the grant
c. Funder name in the research output was the same as the name of an ancestor or a descendant of the funder in the grant

Note that the replaced/replaced-by relationships and ancestor/descendant hierarchy are taken from the Funder Registry.

Current results

Since March 2022, six additional funders have started registering grants with us. As a result, the total number of grants doubled, and the total number of established relationships between grants and research outputs, linked grants, and linked research outputs quadrupled. Here is the comparison of the total numbers of grants, established relationships, linked grants, and linked research outputs in March 2022 and in January 2023:

95% of grants registered within ten months between March 2022 and January 2023 were registered by one funder: the European Union. This suggests that this funder contributed a lot to this rapid increase in the number of established relationships. It looks like this funder’s grant metadata is of high quality and matches well the funding information given in the research outputs supported by this funder’s grants.

Let’s also compare the breakdowns of all established relationships by the matching method:

The distributions are a bit different. Currently, the percentage of relationships established based on the replaced/replaced-by relationship is much smaller than before, suggesting that newer data uses correct funder IDs instead of deprecated ones. Also, the percentage of the relationships matched by the funder ID increased from 40% to 48%, which is great, because this is the most reliable way of matching.

And here we have the statistics broken down by grant registrants. Only funders with at least 100 registered grants are included. The table shows the number of relationships, grants, linked grants, and linked research outputs, and is sorted by the percentage of linked grants.

funder	relationships	linked research outputs	grants	linked grants
European Union	66,562	60,630	35,530	12,688 (36%)
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation	93	92	113	33 (29%)
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)	15,584	13,464	9,923	2,323 (23%)
James S. McDonnell Foundation	519	513	577	121 (21%)
Melanoma Research Alliance	188	185	425	82 (19%)
Muscular Dystrophy Association	50	50	178	25 (14%)
Parkinson’s Foundation	30	29	107	15 (14%)
Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research	127	127	560	70 (13%)
The ALS Association	96	90	477	58 (12%)
Wellcome	8,868	6,436	17,537	1,735 (10%)
American Cancer Society	19	19	266	15 (6%)
Templeton World Charity organisation	2	2	281	2 (0.7%)
Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI)	73	69	8,723	62 (0.7%)
Children’s Tumor Foundation	1	1	662	1 (0.1%)

There are substantial differences between the percentages of linked grants from different funders. One of the newest registrants, the European Union, is at the top of the table with 36% of their grants linked to research outputs. This further confirms the high quality of the metadata registered by this member. It is worth noticing that this member is responsible for the majority of the growth reported here as they cover Horizon Europe, the European Research Council, and many other funding bodies and schemes.

Why are these percentages so low for some funders? It could be caused by systematic discrepancies between the award numbers attached to the grants and those reported in research outputs. It could also be the case that most grants registered by a given funder are new grants, and the research outputs supported by them simply have not been published yet. Time will tell!

What’s next

We’re dedicating lots of time in 2023 to examine, evolve, and expose the matching we do and can do at Crossref across different metadata fields. We then plan to incorporate matching improvements into our services so that everyone can benefit.

This isn’t a standalone piece of work. As you can see, the more award metadata we have connected to grants by funders and connected to outputs by those who post or publish research, the better we’ll be able to do this. To make it easier for more funders to participate, and based on funder feedback, we’ve built a simple tool for members to register their grants. We will also work to help incorporate grant identifiers into publishing and funder workflows, and further our discussions with the funders in our Funder Advisory Group and the wider community, including working together with the Open Research Funders Group, the HRA, Altum, Europe PMC, the OSTP, and the ORCID Funder Interest Group. And there will be more to come as we work together to consolidate and build out important relationships between funding and outputs - for everyone.

Follow-up

Every new thing takes time to get off the ground and to show evidence of its value. We’ve seen a significant step forward recently with funders joining and contributing to the research nexus. Publishers have been contributing funding data for years, and it’s now becoming much clearer to see how these two communities and these two sets of metadata are coming together to make research smoother and easier to manage and evaluate. If you are ready to register grants, talk about linking up your outputs, or just want to learn more about this work, we’d love to hear from you.

Don't take it from us: Funder metadata matters

Jennifer Kemp — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Why the focus on funding information?

We are often asked who uses Crossref metadata and for what. One common use case is researchers in bibliometrics and scientometrics (among other fields) doing meta analyses on the entire corpus of records. As we pass the 10 year mark for the Funder Registry and 5 years of funders joining Crossref as members to register their grants, it’s worth a look at some recent research that focuses specifically on funding information. After all, there is funding behind so much scholarly work it seems obvious that it would be routinely documented in the scholarly record. But it often isn’t and that’s a problem. These sources make clear the need for accurate funding information and the problems that the lack of it creates.

First, a few notes for context on these sources and the issues they discuss :

The percent of records with funding information reached about 25% as of 2021. Not all items registered are the result of funding but surely it is much higher than 25% so there is considerable room for improvement. The authors cite publishers that omit funding information as well as those that include it routinely. Overall, society publishers are at the top of the list of those that do it well.
Three of the four sources found problems in some cases confirming funding information from the metadata in the original sources. This initially surprised me though less so once I thought about the strange nature of metadata workflows.
The complexity of fully and correctly acknowledging multiple sources of funding in any given publication is a recurring theme.
All of the sources mention the need for manual work in analyzing funding and publication information.

The first two papers are from the same 2022 issue of Quantitative Science Studies and are complementary.

Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka, Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo Waltman; Funding COVID-19 research: Insights from an exploratory analysis using open data infrastructures. Quantitative Science Studies 2022; 3 (3): 560–582. doi: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1162/qss_a_00212

This first paper tackles the timely question of determining which funders have supported publications of COVID-19 research and compares coverage of funding data in Crossref to that in Scopus and Web of Science. Even with so much urgent attention focused on the pandemic, the authors found that only 17% of publications in the COVID-focused CORD-19 database have funding identified in their Crossref records. We’re often asked about differences in the metadata (and citation counts) between Crossref and other sources such as Scopus. In this case, both proprietary sources studied have more funder coverage. If you are disappointed in these results or want to learn more, I encourage you to read the authors’ recommendations for improving funding data in Crossref or get in touch with us.

Bianca Kramer, Hans de Jonge; The availability and completeness of open funder metadata: Case study for publications funded by the Dutch Research Council. Quantitative Science Studies 2022; 3 (3): 583–599. doi: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1162/qss_a_00210

This next paper focuses on a set of outputs funded by the NWO (the Dutch Research Council). Since the funder is already known, the authors could look at multiple sources (Crossref and others) to see whether or where the NWO is correctly identified as the funder. This study also found better coverage than Crossref in proprietary sources like Web of Science. Knowing that not all outputs are the result of funded research, this paper provides a new and useful baseline for comparing percentages of coverage. Discussions of research funding so often focus on the physical and life sciences so it’s very good to see that 37% of works in this study are in the humanities and social sciences.

Borst, T., Mielck, J., Nannt, M., Riese, W. (2022). Extracting Funder Information from Scientific Papers - Experiences with Question Answering. In: , et al. Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. TPDL 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13541. Springer, Cham. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1007/978-3-031-16802-4_24

Given the considerable effort required to conduct these analyses, it’s only logical to consider automating as much of the work as possible. This next paper focuses on automatic recognition of funders in economics papers in digital libraries. An interesting complication described here is the inclusion of funding for open access fees in acknowledgments and while the authors conclude that automated text mining of funder information performs better than manual curation, they also state that manual indexing is still necessary “for a gold standard of reliable metadata.”

Habermann, T. (2022). Funder Metadata: Identifiers and Award Numbers. https://metadatagamechangers.com/blog/2022/2/2/funder-metadata-identifiers-and-award-numbers

Finally, this concise blog post looks at RORs as well as funder names and acronyms. The author shows how acronyms contribute to the need for manual analysis. He also spends some time on award numbers, which is one of the three funding elements publishers can (and, as we’ve seen, should) include in their metadata. Award numbers are also a focus of this work and, unfortunately, another frequent reason for additional manual work.

A common theme: More metadata needed

Though collectively, this research paints a fairly dim picture of the current availability, completeness and accuracy of existing funding information in publication metadata, all is not lost. This is a good opportunity to point out the value and availability of grant records since unique, persistent identifiers for grants (yes, DOIs for grants) paired with more and better funding metadata from publishers go a very long way to realizing the vision of the Research Nexus. And it certainly would make things a whole lot easier for the researchers who use this open metadata to analyze the scholarly record for the rest of us.

How funding agencies can meet OSTP (and Open Science) guidance using existing open infrastructure

Ed Pentz — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.

Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery. While this post does respond to the OSTP guidelines point-by-point, the information here applies to all funding bodies in all countries. It will be equally useful for publishers and other systems that operate in the scholarly research ecosystem.

In response to calls from our community for more specifics, this post:

Provides an overview of the specific ways that Crossref (along with organisations and initiatives like DataCite, ORCID, and ROR) helps U.S. federal agencies—and indeed any other funder—meet critical aspects of the recommendations.
Restates our intent to collaborate with all stakeholders in the scholarly research ecosystem, including the OSTP, the US federal agencies, our existing funder, publisher, and university members, to support the recommendation as plans develop.
References the work and adoption of Crossref Grant DOIs, including analyses of existing metadata matching funding to outputs.
Highlights that what’s outlined in the memo aligns with our longstanding mission to capture and maintain the scholarly record and our vision of the Research Nexus, as we describe in our current blog series, regarding our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR).

Infrastructure already exists to support funder goals; it just needs more adoption

Ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to metadata that captures the scholarly record is an essential part of meeting the aims of the memo but also supporting Open Science globally.

In September, Crossref ORCID, DataCite, and ROR participated in the 2022 Forum on Global Grants Management run by Altum and the summary provides a good example of the importance of open infrastructure and open metadata to the goals of Open Science:

Open Science begins with open infrastructure: Attendees agreed that Open Science relies on many other ‘opens’ – most notably, open metadata, open infrastructure, and open governance. Metadata and DOIs (digital object identifiers) for publications, grants, and research outputs, are essential to illuminate the connections that exist between funding and outcomes. That metadata runs on infrastructure powered by organisations such as Crossref, ORCID, ROR, and DataCite.

As a foundational scholarly infrastructure committed to meeting the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) of governance, insurance, and sustainability, Crossref plays an essential role in implementing and supporting key aspects of the guidance. For many years, we have been focused on the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR), and the shared vision to collectively achieve what we call the Research Nexus, which is described as

A rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Metadata—including persistent identifiers and relationships between different research objects—is the foundation of the Research Nexus and is critical to openly and sustainably fulfilling the OSTP memo’s recommendations.

This topic of open metadata and identifiers isn’t just an issue for research resulting from US federal funding. We are working to implement open scholarly infrastructure globally, bringing significant benefits to the whole scholarly research ecosystem.

The current situation brings to mind the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed yet”. Much of the open infrastructure to support the identifier, metadata and reporting requirements of the OSTP memo already exists, but it is unevenly implemented. Increased collaboration and effort will be needed to bring this all to fruition.

We set out below some steps that all stakeholders can take to meet not just the OSTP guidelines, but Open Science goals more broadly, and globally.

What does ‘adoption’ look like? How exactly do funders and other stakeholders work with this infrastructure?

The OSTP memo calls for specific actions concerning metadata and identifiers where, fortunately, open and global solutions already exist.

For example, item 4 a) says, “Collect and make publicly available appropriate metadata associated with scholarly publications and data resulting from federally funded research.” Crossref and DataCite make metadata, including persistent identifiers (DOIs to be specific), openly available for a broad range of research objects from publications to data. Item 4 b) reads, “Assign unique digital persistent identifiers to all scientific research and development awards and intramural research protocols”. Again, federal agencies and other funders are already joining to register awards and grants and distribute these records openly through Crossref. However, this is an example of uneven adoption as registering awards and grants with DOIs is only being done by a few funders so far, which needs to increase.

Here is an ideal workflow that funders and publishers can already follow

Funders join Crossref to register grants and awards (or indeed any other object such as reports). They apply on our website, accept our terms, and provide key information such as contact details. An annual membership fee ranges from $200-$1200 USD.
Funders and publishers collect ROR IDs and authenticated ORCID iDs for all authors/awardees and their affiliations.
Funders register a Crossref DOI for the award/grant, including awardees’ ORCID iDs and ROR IDs. They send us XML information about the grant (note that we will imminently release an online form to make it easier for the less technical funders). Many funder members register the metadata through a third party, such as Altum (if they use ProposalCentral) or Europe PMC.
At the same time, funders update the awardees’ ORCID record directly with the Crossref Grant DOI and metadata.
Grantees produce research objects and outputs such as data, protocols, code, preprints, articles, conference papers, book chapters, etc.
These objects are registered with Crossref or DataCite, and DOIs are created by the publisher or repository members who include ORCID iDs, Crossref Grant DOIs (gathered from the author), ROR IDs for affiliations for all contributors, and other key metadata such as licensing information, and in the case of publications - references and abstracts. Note that the publisher works its magic (actually, publishers do a lot of editorial and production work, such as including data citations in the references using DataCite DOIs for the data in data repositories).
On the Crossref side, we do a bunch of processing and matching and are planning to refine this and do more. Sometimes relationships are notified and added, such as data citation, preprints related to articles or funding acknowledgements converted from free text to Open Funder Registry IDs and names.
Grant records with Crossref DOIs are now part of the scholarly record. All stakeholders may retrieve the open metadata and relationships through our public APIs. Crossref and DataCite will always provide open metadata, as safeguarded by our respective commitments to POSI.

Anyone can use the open metadata registered with Crossref, DataCite and ORCID as connections have been established between (ideally all) research objects and entities through open metadata and identifiers. This means that:

Funding agencies can monitor compliance with their policies
Publishers can identify the funder and meet their requirements
Funding agencies can assess and report on the reach and return of their funding programs
The provenance and integrity of the scholarly record is preserved and discoverable, benefitting all stakeholders.

Suggestions for meeting OSTP and Open Science guidance, point by point

OSTP Recommendation	Publishers should…	Funding agencies should…
4 a) Collect and make publicly available appropriate metadata associated with scholarly publications and data resulting from federally funded research	For scholarly publications: register comprehensive metadata & DOIs with Crossref. For scholarly data: register comprehensive metadata and DOIs with DataCite.	Use Crossref’s API to retrieve publication and other metadata. Use DataCite’s API to retrieve data/repository metadata.
i) all author and co-author names, affiliations, and sources of funding, referencing digital persistent identifiers, as appropriate;	Collect and validate the following from authors at manuscript submission: ROR & ORCiD IDs, Crossref Grant DOIs. Include data citations in reference lists, preferably with DataCite DOIs.	Register awards and grants with Crossref and create DOI records for them. Use ORCID’s API to retrieve validated contributor metadata. Update contributors’ ORCID records with Crossref Grant DOIs and metadata. Use ROR API to retrieve and verify affiliation metadata. Recommend data citations be included in published outputs.
ii) the date of publication; and,	Include acceptance and publication dates in Crossref metadata.	Use Crossref’s API to retrieve publication dates.
iii) a unique digital persistent identifier for the research output;	For scholarly publications and research outputs: register full metadata & DOIs with Crossref. For scholarly data: register full metadata and DOIs with DataCite.	Use Crossref and DataCite APIs to retrieve DOIs for research outputs.
4 b) Instruct federally funded researchers to obtain a digital persistent identifier that meets the common/core standards of a digital persistent identifier service defined in the NSPM-33 Implementation Guidance, include it in published research outputs when available, and provide federal agencies with the metadata associated with all published research outputs they produce, consistent with the law, privacy, and security considerations.	Collect ORCID iDs on manuscript submission for all authors. Register Crossref and DataCite DOIs and metadata for research outputs, including data.	Recommend that researchers applying for funding obtain an ORCID iD and collect them upon grant application for all applicants. Prepopulate grant applications with CV and publication information from applicants’ ORCID records. ORCID iDs should be included in the grants registered by the agencies with Crossref. Agencies can use our open APIs to retrieve the metadata on publications and data rather than ask researchers to do it, saving time and effort.
4 c) Assign unique digital persistent identifiers to all scientific research and development awards and intramural research protocols that have appropriate metadata linking the funding agency and their awardees through their digital persistent identifiers.		Join Crossref to register Crossref Grant DOIs, including ROR IDs and ORCID iDs Ensure grant proposal and assessment systems integrate with Crossref, ROR for affiliations and with ORCID for applicants/awardees.
5 a) coordinate between federal science agencies to enhance efficiency and reduce redundancy in public access plans and policies, including as it relates to digital repository access;	Work with agencies to ensure a smooth, automated workflow.	Using and supporting existing open scholarly infrastructure and using open identifiers will avoid duplication of effort and make the overall ecosystem more efficient .
5 b) improve awareness of federally funded research results by all potential users and communities;	Collect Crossref Grant DOIs from authors and use them to link from publications to grant information.	Communicate your Crossref Grant DOIs and open grant metadata widely via human and machine interfaces. Inclusion in the Crossref API will enhance dissemination and discoverability Update contributors’ ORCID records with Crossref Grant DOIs and metadata
5 c) consider measures to reduce inequities in the publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers;		Registering grants and sharing metadata through Crossref means it’s part of the world’s largest open community-governed metadata exchange and makes it available to the entire world without restriction.
5 d) develop procedures and practices to reduce the burden on federally funded researchers in complying with public access requirements;	Ensure your systems and those you work with make it as easy as possible for authors to provide the necessary metadata and persistent identifiers - work towards as much automation as possible and pulling from other systems rather than asking for data to be re-keyed.	Ensure the platforms you work with, such as grant proposal or assessment systems, retrieve and prepopulate ROR IDs, ORCID iDs, and Crossref and DataCite DOIs and associated metadata whenever possible so that the researchers don’t have to manually rekey or reformat data.
5 e) recommend standard consistent benchmarks and metrics to monitor and assess implementation and iterative improvement of public access policies over time;		Ensure that platforms and systems integrate with ROR, ORCID, Crossref, and DataCite so that this open metadata can lead to the creation of benchmarks and metrics.
5 f) improve monitoring and encourage compliance with public access policies and plans;	Use open infrastructure to help authors easily comply with public access and funder/institution policies. Automate systems as much as possible.	Using the open infrastructure, metadata, and identifiers outlined in this post will make monitoring more straightforward and compliance easier for all stakeholders. The community can build services on open infrastructure and metadata.
5 g) coordinate engagement with stakeholders, including but not limited to publishers, libraries, museums, professional societies, researchers, and other interested non-governmental parties on federal agency public access efforts;	Work with the global open infrastructure organisations (Crossref, DataCite and ORCID) whose members include funding agencies, societies, publishers, universities, libraries, repositories, museums, NGOs, and many other stakeholders - all looking to improve the efficiency of the research ecosystem.	Work with the global open infrastructure organisations (Crossref, DataCite and ORCID) whose members include funding agencies, societies, publishers, universities, libraries, repositories, museums, NGOs, and many other stakeholders - all looking to improve the efficiency of the research ecosystem.
5 h) develop guidance on desirable characteristics of—and best practices for sharing in—online digital publication repositories;	Support automated systems that use metadata and identifiers to populate repositories automatically.	Collaborate with publishers, Crossref and others to develop automated systems to populate repositories.
5 j) develop strategies to make federally funded publications, data, and other such research outputs and their metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable, to the American public and the scientific community in an equitable and secure manner.	Provide and support a range of discovery services based on open infrastructure.	Encourage discovery services - and develop services - that use the open infrastructure, metadata and persistent identifiers to enable.

Everybody needs to play their part

A lot of the work on making the above happen is already underway, and there is widespread adoption of open identifiers and metadata, but as noted above, funders are still early in the adoption journey, and implementation among all stakeholders is patchy.

Critical parts of the infrastructure rely on third-party platforms that supply tools and systems to authors, funders, and publishers - so coordinating the support for the appropriate metadata and identifiers in these systems and tools is very important.

We are emphasising how our existing open scholarly infrastructure systems are helping. But we also know that it’s not all perfect yet. Infrastructure is always evolving, metadata is never complete, refactoring workflows and systems can be costly, and integration can always be smoother. But our existing open infrastructure has already delivered significant benefits, and broader adoption will bring additional benefits to the whole scholarly research and communications ecosystem and help achieve the promise of Open Science in advancing human knowledge.

While working on this coordination and integration, we all try to remember that it should minimise work for researchers, and processes should be as automated as possible.

Collaboration is key to making this all work.

We already work with many funders through our Advisory Group, our 30 funder members, 25 of whom have so far collectively registered around 40,000 Crossref Grant DOIs, retrievable from our open API. Some grants are even matched to resulting outputs already, and some funders have recently dug into Crossref metadata to analyse outcomes from their investments, such as the Dutch Research Council (NWO) which presents findings and makes a case for greater emphasis on Crossref funding metadata.

We also work closely with partners Europe PMC and Altum, and we engage in community research and discussion, for example, through the Open Research Funders Group.

Alongside our fellow infrastructures and open identifier registries ORCID, DataCite, and ROR, we integrate with and support each other operationally and out in the community.

We will continue focusing our resources and efforts on engaging with funders, including US federal agencies responding by the OSTP guidelines, and all stakeholders to support the entire global scholarly research ecosystem.

Everyone has a part to play, and we must all pull together to prioritize this work.

Who’s in?

Please get in touch with Ed, Ginny, or Jennifer (or indeed DataCite or ORCID or ROR) if you’d like to have a discussion about the workflows described here, or just to make sure you’re up to date on the latest developments and opportunities we describe. We look forward to working with all funding agencies to support them as they develop their plans.

Come and get your grant metadata!

Rachael Lammey — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tl;dr: Metadata for the (currently 26,000) grants that have been registered by our funder members is now available via the REST API. This is quite a milestone in our program to include funding in Crossref infrastructure and a step forward in our mission to connect all.the.things. This post gives you all the queries you might need to satisfy your curiosity and start to see what’s possible with deeper analysis. So have the look and see what useful things you can discover.

How it started

Back in 2017 we posted the outcomes of some discussions with a newly-reformed Funder Advisory Group, plotting Crossref’s path. In 2018, Wellcome described their rationale for supporting the grants effort with the help of Europe PMC, and in 2019 the sub-groups of the Advisory Board put out a call for feedback on the metadata plan as the fee model they created was also approved by our board.

Since late 2019, research funders have been registering metadata and identifiers for their grants with us. We currently have a healthy 26k grants registered with us, via 13 funding organisations. I’d specifically highlight Wellcome for volume (registering via Europe PMC), and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) who was the first funder that included ROR IDs in their grant metadata, really getting the value of connecting all related entities and contributors.

The reasons for registering grants with Crossref? Let’s recap:

Support of open data and information about grants
Streamlined discovery of funded content
Improved analytics and data quality
More complete picture of outputs and impact
Better value from investments in reporting services
Improved timeliness, completeness and accuracy of reporting: save time for researchers
More complete information to support analysis and evaluation without relying on manual data entry

How it’s going

For grant information to be used, it’s key that it is is openly available and disseminated as widely as possible. That work starts with funders registering their grants, and continues with us. Now that we’ve completed the REST API’s Elasticsearch migration, we’re happy to announce that all our grant information is now available via our REST API.

Here’s a snippet of the kind of metadata you can see related to the grants registered with us. This is information related to grant record https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.35802/218300, found using this request (https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works/10.35802/218300) which you can use to see the full metadata record:

"publisher": "Wellcome",
"award": "107769",
"DOI": "10.35802/107769",
"type": "grant",
"created": {
"date-parts": [
[
2019,
9,
25
]
],
"date-time": "2019-09-25T07:17:20Z",
"timestamp": 1569395840000
},
"source": "Crossref",
"prefix": "10.35802",
"member": "13928",
"project": [
{
"project-title": [
{
"title": "Initiative to Develop African Research Leaders (IDeAL)"
}
],
"project-description": [
{
"description": "Research is key in tackling the heath challenges that Africa faces. In KWTRP we have been committed to building sustainable capacity alongside an active and diverse research programme covering social science, health services research, epidemiology, laboratory science including molecular biology and bioinformatics. Our strategy has been successful in delivering high quality PhD training, leveraging individual funding and programme funding in order to place students in productive groups and provide high quality supervision and mentorship. Here we plan to consolidate and build on these outputs to address long-term sustainability. We will emphasise the full career path needed to generate research leaders. KWTRP aims to address capacity building for research through an initiative that employs a progressive and long term outlook in the development of local research leadership. The overall aim of the \"Initiative to Develop African Research Leaders\" (IDeAL) is to build a critical mass of African researchers who are technically proficient as scientists and well-equipped to independently lead science at international level, able to engage with funders, policy makers and governments, and to act as supervisors and mentors for the next generation of researchers.",
"language": "en"
},

If you dig in, you can see information about the project, investigators (including their ORCID iDs), the funder, award type, amount, description of the grant, and a link to the public page showing information about the grant. More information on the required and optional fields is available in our grants markup guide.

Here are some examples of the kind of things you can now ask:

And bibliographic queries finding entries in…

Award number:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works?query.bibliographic=7196&filter=type:grant

Project title:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works?query.bibliographic=RIZ1&filter=type:grant

More to do

This is a milestone but it’s not the end of the story. We have more to add relationships, encourage the use of this metadata amongst publishers and their platforms, and to add grant records to our tools such as Participation Reports and Metadata Search. But in the meantime, feel free to get in touch if you have queries about registering grants with us or about using the related metadata in your tools and services.

This information will grow over time as more funders join Crossref and add their grant metadata and as more analyses is possible. We’re looking forward to the next steps!

Funders and infrastructure: let’s get building

Josh Brown — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Human intelligence and curiosity are the lifeblood of the scholarly world, but not many people can afford to pursue research out of their own pocket. We all have bills to pay. Also, compute time, buildings, lab equipment, administration, and giant underground thingumatrons do not come cheap. In 2017, according to statistics from UNESCO, $1.7 trillion dollars were invested globally in Research and Development. A lot of this money comes from the public - 22c in every dollar spent on R&D in the USA comes from government funds, for example. Funders really do support a LOT of research.

For that research to count, it needs to be communicated. For us to interpret those research communications critically, we need to understand how the research was done and who paid for it.

At Crossref, we’ve been working with funders for many years. The Open Funder Registry was launched (with donated support from Elsevier) in 2012, and provides a taxonomy of funders, each uniquely identified, which has grown to cover 20,000 funders around the world. This resource has helped to connect the organisations that provide research funds to resources, projects, and publications. Some are also members and have been registering content with us. This is a growing trend as more funders start to launch their own open platforms. Funders also consume metadata from Crossref members, using it to track and report on the published outputs of the researchers they support.

More recently, we have been exploring the ways that we can do more in partnership with the funding community. As our board concluded in 2017,

Crossref requires increased emphasis on funders, understanding their needs and requirements and increasingly including funders in the scholarly communication dialogue.

In response, we have explored new services and practical enhancements to our existing portfolio, such as the new grants registration system, which will also power search and lookup tools.

This new initiative will link structured information about grants with DOIs, and enable us to provide open tools to help institutions, publishers, and research supporting organisations to re-use that data and make long-lasting connections between specific funding (and other kinds of research support) and research activities and outcomes. The value of this was beautifully explained by our friends at Wellcome (now members) in this blog post, and was reinforced by a recent survey undertaken by ORCID in which linking grants to outputs was cited as one of the major challenges facing funders. The Crossref Grant Linking System launched this July with a group of early adopter funders, ably supported by the team at Europe PMC.

We’re not stopping there though: we are lucky to have a dedicated and engaged funder advisory group, and we will continue to work with them to understand how our interactions with funders can benefit the wider ecosystem that we support, and help funders to achieve their goals.

There are many platforms providing vital intelligence to funders, from Dimensions to OpenAIRE, which rely on Crossref data. Last month, I was at the OAI11 workshop in Geneva, and it was striking how many presentations included a slide that mentioned using Crossref data. There were 200 people from the open science community there, and they clearly rely on Crossref as a foundational infrastructure to build their ecosystem. That community is also just a subset of the more than 2,500 registered consumers of Crossref metadata. We need to keep asking how this metadata can improve the information available to funders, to their partners and to service providers. Adding grants to the mix will help all of these parties provide an even richer picture of research.

As we move forward with our engagement with the global funding community, new opportunities are becoming visible, and not just for funders. Better experiences for authors, reduced overhead for publishers and easier benchmarking for institutions are a selection of benefits that this work can help us realize.

When we really start to get to grips with opening up information about the inputs to research in the way we already have with its outputs, truly exciting things can happen. The really great thing about this is that, quite literally, everyone benefits: from Crossref members to everyone touched by advances in our understanding of the world. Let’s get building!

Request for feedback on grant identifier metadata

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ resonates in a way other terms do not. The truth is in the metadata, and we intend to collect (and our funder friends are prepared to provide) information about a number of funding types. Hopefully we encompass all of them.

Our technical & metadata working group (a subset of the broader Funder Advisory Group) includes folks from Children’s Tumor Foundation, Europe PMC, European Research Council, JST, OSTI (DOE), Smithsonian, Swiss National Science Foundation, UKRI, Wellcome, as well as colleagues at DataCite and ORCID.

They have provided a wealth of funding data and feedback, and together we’ve come up with a metadata schema that works for us. Just as important - does this set of metadata meet your needs? Did we miss something? Let us know.

The details

For those of you familiar with Crossref Content Registration, Grant IDs will have their own dedicated schema that differs from our publication schema. The Grant ID schema will follow some of the same conventions as we’ll be using the same system to process the files (which will be XML) but since we are collecting metadata for a new community and moving beyond published content, this is an opportunity to rethink how we handle some basics like person names and dates.

Each Grant ID can be assigned to multiple projects. The metadata within each project includes basics like titles, descriptions, and investigator information (including affiliations) as well as funding information. Funders will supply funder information (including funder identifiers from the Crossref Funder Registry) as well as information about funding types and amounts.

A major accomplishment of the group was to develop a simple taxonomy of types of funding. Supported types are:

award
contract
grant
salary-award
endowment
secondment
loan
facilities
equipment
seed-funding
fellowship
training-grant
other

Funding involves more than monetary grants or awards and we’ve attempted to capture the broad categories of funding types. This list is taken from types of funding as defined by our participating funder organisations. We anticipate this list will evolve over time.

Ready to dig in? The schema and documentation are available on GitHub. We will actively take feedback until the end of February 2019. We hope to begin implementation soon after that. Please let us know what you think through GitHub, or feel free to contact me via feedback@crossref.org.

New Board Chair Paul Peters shares our mission

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of last year, Paul Peters—CEO of our member Hindawi—became the new Chair of the Crossref Board. The announcement was made in Singapore at our first LIVE Annual ever held in Asia. I caught up with Paul back in London, UK, where he answered a few questions about what he hopes to bring to the Board, and to the Crossref community as a whole.

1. Congratulations, Paul. How delighted were you to be voted in by your fellow board members, old and new?

That’s a rather leading question ;-)

Seriously though, I am incredibly honored to have been chosen to lead Crossref’s board at such an important point in the organisation’s development. The current composition of the board is as diverse as it has ever been, which is essential if the board is to represent Crossref’s global membership, as well as the wide range of business and publication models that our members use. This diversity on the board will help to support Crossref’s aim of encouraging innovation in scholarly communication by providing open infrastructure that benefits all researchers.

2. You’ve been on our board for nine years. How has it changed in that time and what should the board be most proud of?

When I first joined the board, Crossref was at the stage where you had successfully established persistent reference linking as a standard practice among scholarly journal publishers. And, although this was the original purpose of Crossref, it was by no means an easy task, as it required a diverse group of competing publishers to work together in building shared infrastructure for the common good.

In the nine years since then, I’ve seen Crossref continue to build on this core foundation of technological expertise, the trust and goodwill of its membership, and the diverse skills of its small staff. The result has been the development of important new services (such as Similarity Check) that have become an essential component of the scholarly communications system, support new record types (including both preprints and peer review reports) that are becoming increasingly important in the move towards an Open Science future, and the expansion of Crossref’s membership to include almost 10,000 members of all shapes and sizes from 114 countries around the world.

With regard to the board itself, I have been pleased to see Crossref undergo important changes that have provided greater transparency in the organisation’s governance, as well as more active participation from its members. Last year Crossref put out an open call to invite members to put themselves forward for consideration on the board. As a result of holding its first contested election, Crossref saw a dramatic increase in the engagement of members in the election process. Not only is this important for ensuring that the board is truly representative of the diverse membership, but it will also help to actively engage a larger pool of members in the important work that lies ahead.

3. What do you see as Crossref’s strengths and role?

I believe that Crossref’s past and future success relies on two key strengths. The first is its ability to bring together a large and disparate community of organisations and individuals to create tools and services that no single organisation could develop alone. People sometimes overlook how successful Crossref has been in building the trust and support of a diverse group of stakeholders, however I believe this has been an essential ingredient in the organisation’s success and will be essential as Crossref develops new tools and services in the years to come.

Crossref’s other core strength has been the expertise, passion, and ambitious vision of its staff, many of whom I have had the pleasure of knowing since my first days on the board. The ability to develop and maintain real-time infrastructure serving millions of end-users, while simultaneously developing new products and services, requires an incredible range of skills from technology and product development, to marketing, community outreach, and customer support. Moreover, as a growing non-profit organisation with thousands of members around the world, and an international staff working across national boundaries, Crossref’s legal, financial, and administrative support team have also been an essential ingredient in the organisation’s success.

4. We’ve grown beyond just the publisher constituency to libraries, scholars, and platforms and tools, which constituencies do you see us involving next?

Over time I believe that Crossref’s constituency will grow to cover all organisations that contribute to the creation and dissemination of scholarly research, although I recognize this may take several years to achieve.

In the short-term, I believe that research funders are the most important stakeholder group for Crossref to focus on, for the following reasons:

First, with the development of the open Funder Registry and the addition of structured funding data to the Crossref registry, Crossref has already become an important provider of open infrastructure for research funders.
Second, as the result of several key initiatives within the Open Science movement I believe that research funders will play an increasingly important role in determining how scholarly research outputs are created, shared, evaluated, and re-used. Therefore, the active involvement of research funders in Crossref’s membership and governance is essential.
Finally, I believe that there is an important opportunity for Crossref to enable a range of new services across the research lifecycle by providing persistent identifiers and structured metadata research grants. Given how critical grants are within the research process, I’m amazed by the lack of infrastructure to monitor, evaluate, and build upon grants as first-class research objects. In many cases there is minimal, if any, public information about the grants that have been awarded by a particular funder. Even in cases where such data is available, it is rarely structured in a way that enables it to be searched or analyzed across multiple funding agencies.

In the absence of a community-driven, non-profit organisation like Crossref to provide this infrastructure on an open basis, there is a risk that funders will be forced to rely on proprietary alternatives that limit how this information is used and by whom. Fortunately there are already efforts underway within Crossref to develop both the tools and the community of funders that will be required to create persistent identifiers and structured metadata for grants and other forms of research funding.

5. What are the biggest challenges facing Crossref?

I believe that Crossref’s greatest challenge will be to continue to bring together a diverse group of stakeholders, some of whom are regularly at odds with each other, in order to collaborate in developing tools and services for the benefit of the research community.

As challenging as it has been for Crossref to bring together competing publishers to build the shared services that we have all come to depend on, I believe that keeping the community focused towards a common goal will become even more challenging as that community expands to include funders, universities, and the many other organisations involved in the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, I think that Ed and his team have as good of a chance of succeeding as anyone could hope for, which is why I am so excited about Crossref’s future in the years ahead.

6. How will things change with you as Chair? You’ll be busier I guess. But enough about you already, what can we expect as staff and Board?

As my first order of business I’ll be getting rid of Crossref’s corporate jet, lavish office spaces, and executive chef. </sarcasm>.

On a more serious note, my hope is that as Chair I will be able to work with the other members of the board in supporting Crossref’s staff as they work to achieve the ambitious goals we have set out during the past year. I believe that Crossref’s board members and staff are aligned in the desire to significantly expand the range of services Crossref provides, as well as the communities it serves.

The board still has an important role to play in shaping the organisation’s strategic vision, while giving staff ample space to execute on this vision. Said another way, I hope to enable some lively strategic conversations among the board while making sure that we don’t get in the way of Ed and his team once it’s time to put ideas into action.

On a more personal note, I hope to be a good sounding board for Ed on any issues that he faces, either internally or externally, on the road ahead. Given my own experience in leading a growing organisation through a period of significant change, I know how important it can be to have someone to talk to when difficult challenges arise, which they inevitably will. I hope that I can be a good advisor—and also a good friend—to Ed as he leads Crossref into the exciting future that lies ahead.

Ginny: Thanks, Paul. I know Ed will miss his personal chef… but we look forward to working with you too!

Wellcome explains the benefits of developing an open and global grant identifier

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Wellcome, in partnership with Crossref and several research funders including the NIH and the MRC, are looking to pilot an initiative in which new grants would be assigned an open, global and interoperable grant identifier. Robert Kiley (Open Research) and Nina Frentrop (Grants Operations) from the Wellcome explain the potential benefits this would deliver and how it might work.

Introduction

As a funder we want to be able to track the outputs that arise from research we have funded. Currently, this is not as straightforward as it should be as researchers do not always cite their funder correctly, let alone their specific grant number. And, even when they do this accurately, because every funder users its own set of grant IDs, these numbers are not unique. For example, we can use EuropePMC to look up outputs from grants with ID 207467, and see that there is one Wellcome grant with this number, and one from the European Research Council.

To resolve such issues, we need a system in which every grant awarded is giving a unique, global ID. Global IDs are already assigned to articles DOIs, people ORCIDs and even biological materials RRIDs. It is time for the funder community to follow suit.

Benefits of an open & global grant identifier system

Once implemented, it would make the identification of grant-specific research outputs more accurate, whilst simultaneously reducing the burden on the researcher.

Currently, researchers are typically asked to manually disclose what outputs have arisen from their funding. In the future, such disclosures would be fully automated. We are already seeing how publishers—who collect ORCIDs through their manuscript submission system—automatically update the author’s ORCID record with details of new publications. If a global ID system for grants was developed, publishers and repositories could also require these to be disclosed on submission, and this data could then programmatically be passed to researcher assessment platforms, like ResearchFish.

How would it work?

For a global grant ID system to work, two things need to happen. First, when a new grant is awarded, that grant must be assigned a unique ID. For the pilot project we plan to contract with Crossref who will register a unique ID, (a DOI) for every grant we register.

Second, every DOI must resolve to a publicly accessible web site, where information about that grant is disclosed. Again, for this pilot we will almost certainly use the Europe PMC Grants Finder Repository, as we already make grant data available from this resource.

A working group has been established to determine precisely what metadata we should make available, but it is likely to include the name of the grant holder, title and value of the award, a short abstract, along with the name of the funder and the unique ID. Mindful that funders already assign IDs to the grants they award and that any changes to this process may be problematic (and certainly time consuming), the plan is to register a DOI which still makes use of the existing grant ID. To make it unique however, the ID will be prefixed with a funder identifier, most likely the Funder Registry ID.

Next steps

Whilst the metadata working group is focusing on the technical aspects of the pilot, a separate “governance group” is examining how a funder might become a member of Crossref and what the business model for registering grant DOIs should be.

In parallel with this, a pilot “proof of concept” initiative is under way, and we anticipate that by autumn 2018 we will have registered DOIs for a defined cohort of grants.

Ultimately we want to get to a situation where every grant has a unique ID, which can then be unambiguously linked to the all outputs – articles, data, code, materials, patents etc. – which arise from it.

And, if every funder were to adopt such a system and expose their grant metadata in a consistent, machine-readable way, it would facilitate the development of applications to help funders get a greatly enhanced picture of the global funding landscape, which in turn would inform strategic planning and resource allocation.

Thanks to guest authors:

Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome [ORCID: 0000-0003-4733-2558] Nina Frentrop, Grants Information & Systems Manager, Wellcome

Please read Crossref for funders for context, and contact Ginny Hendricks at Crossref with any questions.

Global Persistent Identifiers for grants, awards, and facilities

Ginny Hendricks — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref’s Open Funder Registry (neé FundRef) now includes over 15 thousand entries. Crossref has over 2 million metadata records that include funding information - 1.7 million of which include an Open Funder Identifier. The uptake of funder identifiers is already making it easier and more efficient for the scholarly community to directly link funding to research outputs, but lately we’ve been hearing from a number of people that the time is ripe for a global grant identifier as well.

To that end, Crossref convened its funder advisory group along with representatives from our collaborator organisations, ORCID and DataCite, to explore the creation of a global grant identifier system.

We thought you might like to know about what we’ve been discussing…

The First Rule of Grant Identifiers

The first rule of grant identifiers is that they probably should not be called “grant identifiers”. Research is supported in a variety of ways—through grants, endowments, secondments, loans, use of facilities/equipment and even crowd-funding. In any of these cases, it is important to be able to link researchers and research outputs to details about the sources of support. This is true for prosaic reasons—to understand ROI, to map the competitive landscape, to ensure that mandates are fulfilled, to avoid double payment. But it is also true for epistemic reasons; understanding how research was funded can help contextualise that research, and help expose potential conflicts of interest or specific agendas.

The Open Funder Registry which provides a coarse mapping between research outputs and funders, but it is becoming clear that we need more fine-grained mapping directly to information about the kind of support that was provided.

Awkwardly, none of us had any great ideas about alternative nomenclature, so we’ve made the eminently practical decision to continue to use the term “grant identifier” whilst being aware that our aim is to define a system that applies more broadly to any form of funding or support of research. So +1 for practicality.

Why do we need an open, global, grant identifier?

With the steady increase in research outputs, and the growing number of active researchers from both academia and industry, research stakeholders find they need to be able to automate workflows in order to scale their systems efficiently. Funders want to be able to track the outputs that arise from research they have funded. As a result, institutions find themselves having to regularly analyse and summarise the research their faculty produces. Faculty, in turn, face increasing accounting bureaucracy in order to meet all the reporting requirements that are cascading through the system. And finally, publishers are seeking to make the manuscript submission and evaluation process more efficient as well as to increase the discoverability and contextual richness of their publications.

Most funders already have local, internal grant identifiers. But there are over 15K funders currently listed in the aforementioned Open Funder Registry. The problem is that each funder has its own identifier scheme and (sometimes) API. It is very difficult for third parties to integrate with so many different systems. Open, global, persistent and machine-actionable identifiers are key to scaling these activities.

We already have a sophisticated open, global, interoperable infrastructure of persistent identifier systems for some key elements of scholarly communications. We have persistent identifiers for researchers and contributors (ORCID iDs), for data and software (DataCite DOIs), for journal articles, preprints, conference proceedings, peer reviews, monographs and standards (Crossref DOIs), and for Funders (Open Funder Registry IDs).

And there are similar systems under active development for research organisations, conferences, projects and resources reported in the biomedical literature (e.g. antibodies, model organisms). At a minimum, open, persistent identifiers address the inherent difficulty in disambiguating entities based on textual strings (structured or otherwise). This precision, in turn, allows automated cross-walking of linked identifiers through APIs and metadata which enable advanced applications.

For example, the use of identifiers can simplify user interfaces and save users time. Almost everybody in scholarly communications spends a frustrating portion of their lives copying information from one system to another. This process is not just tedious, it is also error-prone. But we are increasingly seeing systems make use of identifiers to eliminate the need for a lot of this manual copying. For example, researchers using an ORCID iD when they submit a manuscript can start to expect that their relevant ORCID biographical data will simply be imported into the manuscript tracking system so that it doesn’t have to be manually copied over. And if said researcher has their manuscript accepted, they can also expect that their ORCID record will automatically be updated with the publication information and that their institution and/or their funder can be automatically notified of the impending publication so that relevant repositories and CRIS systems can be populated automatically.

Additionally, there is a growing list of services that have been built on top of these standard identifiers. Profile systems (e.g. VIVO, Impact Story, Kudos) can automatically retrieve the latest information from a researcher’s ORCID record. Bibliographic management tools (EasyBib, Zotero, Papers) allow researchers to cite content with the latest metadata. And similarity checking services can harvest and index the latest scholarly literature for inclusion in the tools they have developed for detecting plagiarism and fraud. Funder identifiers are already playing an important role in this metadata workflow. As of November 2017, there are 1.7 million Crossref publication DOIs that are explicitly linked to an Open Funder Registry ID. These linkages serve as a foundation for initiatives like SHARE, CHORUS, and the Jisc Publications Router. But there are another 1+ million records that have funding information without an associated ID and, of course, 90+ million records that have no funding information at all.

So If we have global funder identifiers and they are already working, why do we need global grant identifiers as well? Don’t we just need to increase uptake of funder identifiers? How will grant identifiers help?

First, global grant identifiers could greatly reduce the UX complexity of gathering funder information. This, in turn, would boost the collection of funding information from researchers and ensure that the information that they provide to publishers, institutions and other funders is accurate and complete.

Second, the introduction of global grant identifiers would further increase the utility of links between research outputs and funding information. A grant identifier provides more granular information about the funding. Instead of just linking to information about the funder, a grant identifier would allow linking research outputs to particular research programs along with the information relating to those programs, such as grant durations, award amounts, etc. It would also allow analysis of relationships between multiple co-funding bodies.

To DOI or not to DOI?

Clearly, we think DOIs are pretty good things. But we also aren’t zealots. Sometimes DOIs are appropriate and sometimes they are not. For example, we were instrumental in defining the structure of the ORCID identifier and, in that case, we decided that DOIs were not appropriate.

But in the case of a global grant identifier system, we think there are a number of reasons adopting DOIs would be useful:

It is easy to “overlay” the global DOI system onto existing local identifier systems. An organisation does not need to abandon their internal identifier scheme in order to use DOIs. They can instead incorporate their local scheme into the DOI structure via the simple mechanism of prepending their existing identifiers with an assigned DOI prefix and registering relevant metadata with a DOI registration agency like Crossref or DataCite.
DOI links are “persist-able”. That is they can resolve to different online locations even if domain names change and/or the DNS system itself is replaced. This characteristic is important for a grant identifier because funding agencies - particularly government funding agencies - tend to undergo frequent reorganisations (e.g. splitting, merging, restructuring) and renaming. An indirectly resolvable identifier like a DOI (or ARK, Handle, etc.) is critical to ensure the long-term integrity of identifiers in these situations.
There are 15K+ funders currently listed in the Open funder Registry. Each has their own grant identifier scheme and different levels of technical support for them (APIs, etc.). This makes it very difficult for 3rd parties to build tools that work “generically” with grant identifiers. But once a local identifier scheme had been “globalised” by making it a DOI, third parties can build tools without having to worry about the differences between individual funder systems.
Crossref and DataCite DOIs are deeply embedded in the tools and workflows of scholarly communications. Manuscript tracking systems, bibliographic management systems, metrics systems, CRIS systems, profile systems, etc. often have built-in mechanisms for consuming and making use of DOIs and their associated metadata.
Crossref and DataCite DOIs are cross-disciplinary. They are used in the humanities, social sciences, sciences and in a host of communities that frequently interact with the scholarly literature for example- NGOs, IGOs, patent systems, and standards bodies.
Crossref and DataCite provide a variety of APIs (e.g. REST, OAI-PMH) and services (e.g. search, Crossmark, Similarity Check, Scholix) built around DOIs.
DOI’s have a useful characteristic, which is that the “prefix” of a DOI can be used to determine who originally created the record with which the DOI is associated. In the case of grant identifiers, this means that the prefix of a DOI-based grant identifier could be used to automatically determine the correct funder responsible for the initial grant. This means that the UIs for entering funder/grant information could be both simplified and made more robust—which would likely increase the number of parties that collect and propagate id-based funder information.

But the use of DOIs as the basis for grant identifiers also introduces some potential barriers to adopting a standard funding identifier. For example:

Funders would need to be able to join a suitable DOI registration agency (e.g. Crossref, DataCite). Some funders (e.g. government agencies) may be restricted in their ability to “join” external organisations.
Funders would need to be able to create new DOIs and register associated metadata with their chosen registration agency in a timely manner. Some funders may be unable to generate metadata or may not have the technical capacity to automatically register metadata.
Funders would need to be able to provide an openly available (e.g. not behind access control) online resource to which the DOI would resolve. For example, a landing page describing the grant or a digital copy of the grant itself. Again, some funders may face technical barriers to providing an online resource to resolve to. In other cases there may be privacy or security reasons for not providing an open resource to which a DOI can resolve.

Still, the advisory group consensus has been that these barriers are generally surmountable. Most of the questions they had revolved around understanding what a DOI-based workflow would look like from the funder’s perspective, and so we outlined the steps a funder would need to take in order to adopt DOI-based global identifiers.

The DOI-based grant identifiers workflow

A funder registering metadata and creating DOIs for grants would need to support the following workflow:

When a grant is submitted, the funder would assign their own internal identifier for tracking, etc. For example 00-00-05-67-89.
If the grant is accepted, the funder would:

generate a global public identifier for the grant based on the DOI. For example, assuming their prefix was 10.4440, then the global public identifier might become https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.4440/00-00-05-67-89.
create a “landing page” on their website (or wherever they make their grants available online) to which the global public identifier will resolve. The landing page would display a TBD set of metadata describing the grant, as well as a link to the grant itself.
register the generated DOI and a TBD set of metadata with their registration agency (RA) (e.g. Crossref or DataCite). This metadata would include the URL of the landing page defined above.

Once metadata and DOIs are registered with an RA, the funder would have a series of ongoing obligations:

Update locations: If the location of the landing page changes (for example, because of a site restructuring, merger of split of the funding organisation, etc.), the funder would need to update their metadata records to point the DOI to the new location.
Update metadata: If metadata becomes out-of-date (e.g. the status of a grant changes, additional grant-related metadata is added, etc.), the funder would update the relevant records.
Promote the use of the the DOI as the preferred global, public identifier for the grant. That is - the one that people should use when referring to or citing the grant (the funder can continue to use the original local identifier for their internal systems, etc.).

Again, the advisory group thought that this workflow seemed tractable and agreed that the best way to ensure that would be to proceed to creating a working pilot of a global grant identifier system based on the DOI.

Next steps

Crossref is starting a grant identifier pilot. We will create two sub-groups of the funder advisory group.

Group for “Governance, membership, and fees”

This group will look at governance and financial issues raised by the introduction of grant identifiers. For example, it will look at whether Crossref’s membership model works as is or might need to be adjusted in order to accommodate a new constituency. We know, for example, that some funders find it hard to become “members” of organisations. We might need to create other participation categories in order to accommodate these restrictions. Similarly the group will look design a pricing model of DOIs for grants in order to make sure that they cover the costs of modifying and sustaining the system for them, as well as to ensure that the pricing incentivises funders to participate. This sub-group will work closely with Crossref’s membership and fees committee.

Group for “Technical and metadata”

This group will look at any technical changes that need to be made to registration process in order to accommodate the new participants. If there are, they are likely to center around specific metadata requirements for grants. As such, the group will likely spend most of its time agreeing to a practical metadata schema for capturing relevant information about the myriad of ways in which organisations support research. This group will also liaise with other relevant technical working groups, such as those who are looking at organisational identifiers and conference identifiers.

The two sub-groups will first meet in January and, after a few meetings, will report back the advisory group with recommendations. Using these recommendations, we will develop an implementation plan which will include testing the infrastructure, testing metadata deposits, fee modelling, etc, with a small group of participants.

If you are a funder, and you would like to have somebody from your origanization participate in one of these working groups, please contact Ginny Hendricks. Note that joining the above groups does not commit you to anything other than engaging in the discussion. We want to make sure we create a system that works for a range of funders, not just those who can start testing something right away.

Using the Crossref REST API. Part 3 (with SHARE)

Rachael Lammey — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As a follow-up to our blog posts on the Crossref REST API we talked to SHARE about the work they’re doing, and how they’re employing the Crossref metadata as a piece of the puzzle. Cynthia Hudson-Vitale from SHARE explains in more detail…

Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, digital data librarian in Research Data and GIS Services at Washington University in St. Louis Libraries and visiting program office for SHARE

SHARE (http://share-research.org) is building a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. It is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. SHARE’s data set is free, openly licensed, and built with open source technology developed at the Center for Open Science (COS). Launched in beta in April 2015 the data set has grown to more than 6 million records from 100+ providers, including Crossref, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), DataONE, 50+ library institutional repositories, and more.

How is the Crossref REST API used within SHARE?

SHARE currently harvests metadata from Crossref using the Crossref application programming interface (API). We pull such metadata values as journal title, author, DOI, journal name, and publisher, to name just a few. This metadata is then fed into our data processing pipeline, normalized, and aggregated into the full data set.

What are the future plans for SHARE?

Phase II of SHARE, launched in late 2015, focuses on adding metadata providers, enhancing the metadata, and making connections and links between the metadata records. These links will show the entire life cycle of research and scholarship—connecting a data management plan, grant award information, data deposits, analytic/software code, pre-publications, final manuscripts, and more.

To move these plans forward, SHARE is applying machine-learning and automation techniques and working with the community to verify metadata enhancements and curate the metadata. Current technology work focuses on imputing subject domain keywords and object types into the SHARE data set using learning models and heuristics. Data models and schemas are in development to connect the research lifecycle, connect multiple instances of an object to a single entity, and capture metadata provenance.

What else would SHARE like to see in Crossref metadata?

We would love to see rights-declaration metadata elements and article references/citations included in the metadata about digital objects. The rights-declaration information is invaluable for individuals who want to know what category the object is in (public domain, copyrighted, etc.), what constraints or permission requirements exist, contact information, and more. Additionally, networks of research can be discovered and meta-scholarship facilitated by making article reference lists machine-readable and openly available.

What’s next?

Does this give you any ideas? Feel free to get in touch with questions or take the API for a spin yourself and let us know what you can do with it!

Research Funders on Crossref

From commitment to connection: 200,000 grants in the scholarly record

Fonds de Recherche du Québec

European Commission

Wellcome

From 1990 to today: connecting HFSP's grant history to the research nexus

Matching funders in scholarly metadata: linking names to ROR IDs

Key takeaways

Introduction

Overview of the funder matching strategy

Evaluation dataset for funder matching

Evaluation methodology

Results

From evaluation to production

Reduction of Grant DOI registration fees: a boost for the Research Nexus

A fee reduction and a two-year fee waiver pilot

Supercharging the Grant Linking System

Why give funders a fee break and not others?

Wellcome and Europe PMC: supporting Open Research through open metadata

What motivated you to join Crossref?

The way Wellcome implemented the Grant Linking System is a bit unique, given that it partnered with Europe PMC for the technical implementation and metadata registration with Crossref. Can you tell us more about how it works?

How is Wellcome leveraging the funding metadata and Crossref grants IDs that are being shared and registered with Crossref?

Wellcome is streamlining the way of asking grantees to report on their publications, facilitated by Europe PMC. Can you tell us a bit more about how this will work and what role metadata will play?

If you look into the future, what would your hopes be for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general? What do you think that we could achieve collectively as a community?

What would you say to colleagues in other funders about investing in open metadata?

Integrating grant metadata for seamless research interconnectivity at FCCN|FCT

Could you introduce your organisation?

What motivated you to join Crossref?

Can you tell us about your experience using the Grant Linking System?

What do you find useful about registering grant metadata with Crossref?

What are your hopes for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general?

Has anything surprised you while implementing the Grant Linking System?

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other research funders?

If you could change something about the GLS or how the grant metadata you register is used, what would it be?

Version in Portuguese

Integração de metadados de financiamento pela FCCN|FCT para reforçar a interoperabilidade da informação sobre a atividade científica

Poderia apresentar a sua organização?

O que motivou a adesão à Crossref?

Pode falar-nos sobre a sua experiência com o Grant Linking System?

O que considera útil no registo de metadados de financiamento na Crossref?

Quais são as suas expectativas para o GLS e para uma maior transparência dos metadados de financiamento em geral?

Algo o surpreendeu durante a implementação do Grant Linking System?

Com base na sua experiência, qual seria o seu conselho para colegas de outros financiadores de investigação?

​​Se pudesse alterar algo no GLS ou na forma como os metadados dos subsídios que regista são utilizados, o que seria?

Connecting the dots: FWFs transition to linked grant metadata to support a thriving culture of openness

Could you introduce your organisation? And what is your role?

What motivated you to join Crossref?

Can you tell us about your experience using the Grant Linking System?

How was your journey to socialise the Grant Linking System within your research community? How did you communicate the importance of identifiers and grant metadata to your grant holders?

What do you find useful about registering grant metadata with Crossref?

What are your hopes for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general?

What were the key challenges you encountered when embracing the GLS, and how did you overcome them?

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other research funders?

Version in German

Connecting the Dots: Wie der FWF durch die Umstellung auf vernetzte Fördermetadaten eine Kultur der Offenheit fördert

Bitte stellen Sie den FWF kurz vor und erklären Sie unseren Leser:innen, was Ihre Rolle dort ist.

Was hat Sie dazu bewogen, Crossref beizutreten?

Können Sie uns mehr über Ihre Erfahrungen mit dem Grant Linking System erzählen?

Welche Erfahrungen haben Sie damit gemacht, das Grant Linking System in Ihrer Forschungscommunity zu bewerben? Wie haben Sie Ihren Fördernehmer:innen die Wichtigkeit von Identifiern und Metadaten vermittelt?

Was finden Sie an der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten bei Crossref am hilfreichsten?

Was erhoffen Sie sich vom GLS und von mehr Transparenz bei Fördermetadaten im Allgemeinen?

Welche Herausforderungen sind bei der Einführung des GLS aufgetreten und wie haben Sie diese gemeistert?

Basierend auf Ihrer eigenen Erfahrung, welchen Ratschlag würden Sie Kolleg:innen bei anderen Fördergebern mitgeben?

Celebrating five years of Grant IDs: where are we with the Crossref Grant Linking System?

What is the Crossref Grant Linking System?

Features of the GLS

How the Crossref Grant Linking System supports Open Science policy

How funders leverage the Grant Linking System in their reporting and assessment

How the community is working to integrate open infrastructure

Acknowledgements and how to participate in the GLS

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Comparing the features of ROR and the Open Funder Registry

Overview

History

Scope

Usage

Tools and services

Community engagement models

What will this mean for you?

Tell us what you need?

Se pudesse alterar algo no GLS ou na forma como os metadados dos subsídios que regista são utilizados, o que seria?