The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) supports the sharing of open funding metadata, connecting Crossref Grant DOIs with research outputs, people and places so funding flows transparently through the scholarly record. As members of Crossref, funders create unique links and open metadata that describe their support of all kinds, from financial grants and access to the use of facilities, to conference attendance and many other research related activities.
The GLS creates a transparent, open, and machine-readable record of the relationship between funding and research, filling in the gaps in the Research Nexus and supporting better reporting, accountability, and analysis of research impact. Research funders and other institutional actors can benefit from the GLS, and Crossref infrastructure as a whole, to contribute to a complete and interoperable Research Nexus. You can read more about the role of research funders and institutions in open research infrastructure policies in Crossref’s position paper.
For: Research funders, Policy makers
Getting started
Become a member | Choose a record registration method | Documentation on registering grants
Why use it
- Assign a globally unique persistent identifier for each grant awarded
- Connect funding with over 187 million published outputs, contributing to the Research Nexus and streamlining processes such as reporting or grant applications
- Access data to track outcomes and make evidence-based decisions about your funding activities
- Increase transparency and provide greater accountability in how research funds are spent to the public and donors
- Fulfil Open Science ambitions by sharing open research information with the global research ecosystem
- Your metadata becomes openly available to thousands of tools and services and through Crossref open and free to use API
- Join Crossref community and influence the foundational infrastructure powering open research information
- Funder-designed metadata schema means that you can describe the grant with information that matters to you, your grantees, regulators and other important stakeholders
How it works
Funders register grant records with Crossref using Crossref’s grant specific metadata schema, and we distribute this metadata openly and globally. Links can be forged with any outputs of the funding, such as publications, preprints, data and code that acknowledge it. GLS creates a transparent, open, and machine-readable record of the relationship between funding and research, supporting better reporting, accountability, and analysis of research impact and research careers.
There are two ways in which links are made between funding and research outputs:
| Crossref Grant DOI field in Crossref metadata schema | Metadata enrichment |
|---|
| Crossref input metadata schema for works (e.g. articles, books, datasets, preprints etc) includes Crossref grants DOIs to unambiguously link the research output being registered with the funding metadata record. This is the preferred path. | We have developed a process where funding is linked to resulting research outputs. We run this analysis periodically You can see the results of the latest iteration and the open dataset. We are working towards implementing a live grant-to-output matching process, you can read more about our matching program. |
Getting started
Somethings you will need:
- An active Crossref membership. If you are already a member you don’t need a new membership. Learn more about Crossref membership and registration fees.
- Unique landing page for each grant, which should always display the DOI as a URL, according to our DOI display guidelines
- A ROR ID or FunderID to uniquely identify your organisation in the grant metadata
- Ability to create and send XML metadata, or allocate staff to register metadata using our helper tools
- A mapping of your award data to the Crossref grant schema. We can provide advice and support as needed.
- Create communications for your awardees to make sure that they acknowledge funding using their award’s Crossref grant DOI. This is important to ensure that your Crossref Grant DOIs are registered back as part of outputs metadata records.
Please contact our membership specialists with any questions about joining, or our technical support specialists with questions about the grants schema or how to register your grants.
