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The best way of acknowledging research funding in the metadata: Crossref Grant ID

Patricia Feeney – 2026 January 06

In Grant Linking SystemMetadataSchemaBest Practice

We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs. 

Funding information is very important for the research community. As explored by some key European funder representatives, providing mechanisms to clearly link funding with its outputs is essential for the community to have a full picture of the research endeavour.

Up until now, if a Crossref member wanted to include a Crossref Grant ID to unambiguously identify the output funding source, they would need to use other available fields, such as for an award number. While it was an important step towards increasing transparency and is heavily used for reporting and impact assessment, being an unstructured field, it was prone to errors, and of course, funders’ internal award identifiers are not unique, persistent, or necessarily open. This limited our ability to create unambiguous relationships with the Crossref Grant DOIs registered by our now ~50 funder members. As the new field becomes increasingly populated by our members, this rich metadata will pave the way for capturing and representing the funding relationships in a more accurate and complete way and fulfilling one of our commitments at the recent funding metadata workshop with the Barcelona Declaration. 

The Crossref Grant ID field in the schema is a clear signal of the growing demand for these persistent Grant IDs (Crossref DOIs), and the relationships these help us create. Those connections can in turn enable streamlined reporting for the grantees, as well as compliance tracking and programme evaluation for funders. 

As part of our work to enable the research nexus, Crossref has been proactively identifying funding information and prototyping metadata enrichment processes through matching projects, ensuring that as many relationships as possible are established and made discoverable. With this schema update, we aim to lower barriers and encourage more members to register output-funding relationships at source. This will facilitate the links that make the research nexus a connected, interoperable, and an important source of information that ensures a transparent and trustworthy research process. 

We encourage all Crossref members to start incorporating Grant DOIs when available into your metadata submissions. By taking advantage of this new field, you’ll help build a more complete and transparent record of research funding, making it easier for the community to understand and trace the impact of funded research. 

When collecting funding information for your publication, please consider asking the authors for the Grant DOI (Crossref Grant ID) as well as the funder’s details (such as their name and identifier). Here’s how the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information’s (OSTI-DOE) grant https://0-doi-org.oasis.unisa.ac.za/10.46936/aps-182101/60010611 can be included in the metadata for related works, from datasets, to preprints, conference proceedings, journal articles, and more:

<assertion name="fundgroup">
         <assertion name="ror">https://ror.org/04qxsr837</assertion>
         <assertion name="grant_doi">10.46936/aps-182101/60010611</assertion>
      </assertion>

Similarly, a grant https://0-doi-org.oasis.unisa.ac.za/10.3030/732489 from European Union H2020-EU.2.1.1. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP, would be represented in related work’s metadata as follows:

<assertion name="fundgroup">
         <assertion name="funder_name”>H2020 LEIT Information and Communication Technologies
		<assertion name="funder_identifier”>10.13039/100010669</assertion>
	</assertion>
         <assertion name="grant_doi">10.3030/732489</assertion>
</assertion>

For more technical documentation and implementation guidance, please visit our funding data documentation. If you have questions or need support integrating Grant IDs into your workflow, our support team is here to help!