At Crossref and ROR, we develop and run processes that match metadata at scale, creating relationships between millions of entities in the scholarly record. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time diving into details about metadata matching strategies, evaluation, and integration. It is quite possibly our favourite thing to talk and write about! But sometimes it is good to step back and look at the problem from a wider perspective.
This yearâs public data file is now available, featuring over 156 million metadata records deposited with Crossref through the end of April 2024 from over 19,000 members. A full breakdown of Crossref metadata statistics is available here.
Like last year, you can download all of these records in one go via Academic Torrents or directly from Amazon S3 via the ârequester paysâ method.
Download the file: The torrent download can be initiated here.
Earlier this year, we reported on the roundtable discussion event that we had organised in Frankfurt on the heels of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. This event was the second in the series of roundtable events that we are holding with our community to hear from you how we can all work together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record - you can read more about insights from these events and about ISR in this series of blogs.
Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We havenât increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while weâre still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:
The Crossref Grant Linking System as it is now, emerged in 2017, when our board agreed that working more closely with research funding organizations should be a key strategic priority for Crossref community. As part of that we reconvened our Funder Advisory Group and started discussing what more Crossref could do to integrate the work of funders more closely with research objects and publications. We worked with the Funder AG to create a new strategic plan and in 2019 launched the Crossref Grant Linking System. This means that many funders are members of Crossref and that tens of thousands of grants already have metadata records (identified by DOIs) that are able to be linked with outputs, activities, people, and organizations. Read more about how Crossref services support funder goals.
Background to the Grant Linking System
Whilst the scholarly community has adopted standard persistent identifiers (PIDs)—for people (e.g. ORCID), content (e.g. DOIs, PMIDs), and now organizations (ROR) including funders (Open Funder Registry)—the record of the award was not captured in a consistent way across funders worldwide. These awards were not easily linked up with the literature or with researchers or with institutions.
With tens of thousands of funding organizations in the Open Funder Registry, we needed to find a way for all of themââsmall and large, private and governmentââto register their grants, whilst making it easy for researchers to include this information in their submissions to publishers and data repositories. One thing to note about Crossref grant records is that they can be registered for all sorts of support for research, such as awards, use of facilities, sponsorship, training, or salary awards. Essentially any form of support provided to a research group.
For this to work more smoothly and accurately, we need grant identifiers. Our Funder Advisory Group worked from 2017 to 2019 to create such a system on a global scale. Part of that work was to agree on a sustainability model along the lines of our current approach for Content Registration of articles and books, and to decide on a schema that would capture enough relevant metadata about grants to satisfy community needs.
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 authorâs ORCID record with details of new publications. [With a global ID system for grants], 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.
Benefits
The “Grant IDs” project evolved into the fully-fledged “Grant Linking System”, which includes:
Funder-designed metadata schema to describe your awards accurately
Globally unique persistent link and identifier to track reach and return of funding and other support
Interface for searching funding outcomes and all data accessible via our open API
Distributed at scale to thousands of platforms and tools throughout scholarly research incl. discovery and assessment
Joined up with Crossref ecosystem of 160 million outputs such as articles, preprints, books, datasets, and other grants
Detailed documentation + specialist technical support
Online form to create grant records and add metadata with no technical input
Possibility to link to Crossref-hosted landing pages if your website isnât ready
Join a community of ~50 Funder Advisory Group members and ~35 funding orgs already registering grants
Collaboration with other community initiatives involving funders, publishers, institutions, other open infrastructures, and tool makers.
In applying for funding, researchers benefit from:
Reduced data entry and improved reusability of information in applications
Better tailored institutional support
Improved targeting and design of career supporting interventions from funders
Improved review
Easier completion of applications
In conducting research, researchers can benefit from:
Boosted current awareness
Easier access to facilities
Reduced administrative overhead
In publishing researchers benefit as authors and as readers from:
Shorter publication delays
Simplified acknowledgement processes
Critical awareness of any potential bias
Richer context and simplified discovery
Reduced uncertainty and administration around policy compliance
In reporting on their activities to funders:
Improved reporting experiences
A shift from data collation/entry to verification
Easier acknowledgement of support for their careers
In building their careers:
Boosted impact and enhanced visibility
As collaborators, from better understanding of the contributions of others and improved recognition for their own contributions
Clearer, more complete and complex career records
Enhanced career recognition and support
More diverse data sources for recognition and reward
At every stage, the core benefits for researchers include:
Better career representations and reputational enhancement
Simplified administration, reporting and application processes with reduced overhead and duplication of effort
Better intelligence about research support and future opportunities for funding and collaboration
Outcomes
Over the years, since the Grant Linking System has evolved, we have been closely watching and analysing the effects of all funding data on the global Crossref infrastructure. This round-up of some of the community’s analyses shows the breadth of applications.
In 2024, we updated some matching on award IDs in publications with grants registering in Crossref, really showing the linking system in effect.
Additionally, publishers are starting to include Crossref Grant IDs in their publication metadata which is best practice in completing the circle of the Grant Linking System. eLife is a good case study, with the following examples:
[to come TK]
Membership & fees
Funders who would like to participate in the Grant Linking System and register their research grants should apply to join as a member. In some cases, your organization may already be a member - so we’ll check on that for you as you may be able to register grants under you existing membership. Membership comes with obligations to maintain the metadata record for the long term; our membership terms sets these out. You will also be able to participate in Crossref governance such as voting in or standing for our annual board elections - it’s very much encouraged to maintain funder voices in the oversight of Crossref. Joining is via a form and a click-through agreement to minimize paperwork. Your first year’s membership invoice needs to be settled before a DOI prefix is assigned and your grant registrations can begin.
We have a dedicated fee structure for funders which allows for a much lower annual membership fee (from USD $200 to USD $1200 depending on annual award value) and a higher per record fee of USD $2.00 for current grants and USD $0.30 for older grants. This allows the cost to be budgeted into the grant itself, rather than through the often non-existent administration or operations budgets. Please see our fees page for more information.
Getting started
If you’re reading this far you must be about ready to get going. You’ll be joining Wellcome, European Research Council, NWO - Dutch Research Council, FWF - Austrian Science Fund, FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal, JST - Japan Science and Technology Agency, CSIRO, ARDC, Melanoma Research Alliance, OSTI at the US Department of Energy, and many other Crossref funder members.
You need to be a member in order to participant in the Grant Linking System and register grants with us; please sign up as described above. Once you’re a member (or in preparation for becoming one), take a look at our documentation on registering grants which will walk you through what you need to know and what information you need to send us in order to do this.
