Blog

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

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.

Global Persistent Identifiers for grants, awards, and facilities

Crossref’s Open Funder Registry (neĂ© 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 organizations, 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…

Using the Crossref REST API. Part 5 (with OpenCitations)

As part of our blog post series on the Crossref REST API, we talked to Silvio Peroni and David Shotton of OpenCitations (OC) about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using the Crossref REST API as part of their workflow.

Using the Crossref REST API. Part 4 (with CLA)

As a follow-up to our blog posts on the Crossref REST API we talked to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using the Crossref REST API as part of their workflow.

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

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


Community responses to our proposal for early content registration

TL;DR: We will proceed with implementing the proposed support for registering content before online availability. Adopting the workflow will be optional and will involve no extra fees. Background At the end of January, Crossref issued a “request for community comment” on a proposed new process to support the registration of content including DOIs before online availability. We promised that we would summarize the results of the survey once we had received and analyzed all the responses.

Crossref & the Art of Cartography: an Open Map for Scholarly Communications

 

In the 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, I introduced a metaphor for the work that we do at Crossref. I re-present it here for broader discussion as this narrative continues to play a guiding role in the development of products and services this year.

Metadata enable connections

Cartography BorgesAt Crossref, we make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess through DOIs. Publishers register their publications and deposit metadata through a variety of channels (XML, CSV, PDF, manual entry), which we process and transform into Crossref XML for inclusion into our corpus. This data infrastructure which makes possible scholarly communications without restrictions on publisher, subject area, geography, etc. is far more than a reference list, index or directory.

A healthy infrastructure needs healthy funding data

We’ve been talking a lot about infrastructure here at Crossref, and how the metadata we gather and organize is the foundation for so many services - those we provide directly - and those services that use our APIs to access that metadata, such as Kudos and CHORUS, which in turn provide the wider world of researchers, administrators, and funders with tailored information and tools.

The initiative formerly known as FundRef 

Together Crossref’s funding data (previously known as FundRef  – we simplified the name)  and the Open Funder Registry, our taxonomy of grant-giving organizations, comprise a hub for gathering and querying metadata related to the questions:

“Who funded this research?” and “Where has the research we funded been published?”

DOI Event Tracker (DET): Pilot progresses and is poised for launch

Publishers, researchers, funders, institutions and technology providers are all interested in better understanding how scholarly research is used. Scholarly content has always been discussed by scholars outside the formal literature and by others beyond the academic community. We need a way to monitor and distribute this valuable information.

Best Practices for Depositing Funding Data

Crossref’s funding data initiative (FundRef) encourages publishers to deposit information about the funding sources of authors’ research as acknowledged in their papers. The funding data comprises funder name and identifier, and grant number or numbers. Funding data can be deposited on its own or with the rest of the metadata for an item of content.