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

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza, Guntram Bauer – 2026 May 14

In CommunityGrant Linking SystemResearch FundersResearch Nexus

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.

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.