What is it?
FundRef is a collaborative project of scholarly publishers and funding agencies, facilitated by CrossRef, to provide a standard way of reporting funding sources for published scholarly research.
FundRef Webinar
Attend an Introduction to FundRef Webinar - Thursday, June 6, 2013 at 11:00 am EDT
FundRef Search
Search for funders by name: FundRef SearchIMPORTANT LINKS
- CrossRef Board of Directors Approves FundRef Tracking Service
- To see how FundRef works view the FundRef workflow (PDF).
- For a short synopsis view the printable summary (PDF).
- Read the FundRef registry requirements (PDF).
- FundRef Pilot News Release, May 2012
- FundRef PIlot Report, March 2013 (PDF)
Why is it necessary?
Government and other research funders are accountable for reporting the research and development outcomes they support. One measure of this output is the publications that result from specific grants or other financial support. Funders do not currently have an easy or standard way to track publications that result from their funding. A combined solution for all funders eliminates the need for each to architect its own solution to the problem. Similarly, many journals and other publications have the ability for authors to acknowledge the source of their funding, but these statements vary widely in practice from journal to journal and publisher to publisher. Standard bibliographic metadata for scholarly publications do not typically include funding source information, which means mining publication data to track funding sources is difficult.
What can be done?
The FundRef project affords funders and scholarly publishers a unique opportunity to collaborate on a solution to this common problem. The project will allow publishers to create and submit standard metadata consisting of the funder name and grant number to CrossRef. Project participants will have access to a standard taxonomy of more than 4,000 funding agencies, developed by Elsevier. We will be working with the major manuscript tracking system vendors to incorporate this controlled vocabulary of funders into the publication submission processes.
Once the funding metadata is available from CrossRef in a standard form, funders would then be able to submit queries by agency to receive lists of CrossRef DOIs for documents funded by that particular organization. They could display bibliographic publication information with CrossRef DOI links to the funded scholarly literature to general public and to the research community on their public websites.
Future developments could include expanding the standard funder list to the program level and to include a grant number verification system. A pilot project of the program ran from March 2012 to February 2013. The FundRef project is scheduled to launch in May 2013.
Who is it for?
FundRef will benefit researchers, in simplifying their submission process, publishers, who will be able to analyze the sources of funding for their published content, and funding organizations, who will be able to better track the results of their funding policies. This initiative will benefit the larger public, as it will support a greater transparency into the results of R&D funding.
Who is involved?
The current participants include CrossRef, several scholarly publishers, and a number of funding organizations.
Publishers |
Funders |
American Institute of Physics (AIP) |
US Department of Energy |
American Psychological Association (APA) |
US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) |
Elsevier Science |
US National Science Foundation |
IEEE |
Wellcome Trust |
Nature Publishing Group |
|
Oxford University Press |
|
Wiley |
|
In the future, we anticipate that additional agencies and publishers will be able to join the effort.
Why CrossRef
CrossRef creates services for the scholarly community that require technical and business collaboration among organizations that cannot be done more efficiently by a single entity. The deposit and query infrastructure, and the business agreements in place already provide for a way for a large number of publishers members to share metadata to accomplish reference linking, Cited-by linking, plagiarism screening, and version tracking. FundRef meets these criteria, and can be provided with a minimum of new overhead and investment.
For more information please contact: fundref@crossref.org
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