Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossrefâs progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. đŚ
The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants.
Event Data is our service to capture online mentions of Crossref records. We monitor data archives, Wikipedia, social media, blogs, news, and other sources. Our main focus has been on gathering data from external sources, however we know that there is a great deal of Crossref metadata that can be made available as events. Earlier this year we started adding relationship metadata, and over the last few months we have been working on bringing in citations between records.
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.
Update on the outage of October 6th. In my blog post on October 6th, I promised an update on what caused the outage and what we are doing to avoid it happening again. This is that update.
Crossref hosts its services in a hybrid environment. Our original services are all hosted in a data center in Massachusetts, but we host new services with a cloud provider. We also have a few R&D systems hosted with Hetzner.
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.
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. Iâd 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, itâs 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 weâve completed the REST API’s Elasticsearch migration, weâre happy to announce that all our grant information is now available via our REST API.
"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:
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!
