In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.
In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!
The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.
It has been 18 (!) years since Crossref last deprecated a metadata schema. In that time, we’ve released numerous schema versions, some major updates, and some interim releases that never saw wide adoption. Now, with 27 different schemas to support, we believe it’s time to streamline and move forward.
Starting next year, we plan to begin the process of deprecating lightly-used schemas, with the understanding that this will be a multi-year effort involving careful planning and plenty of communication.
Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as “trust signals” for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Things to understand while collecting funding data
Funder information:
Funders can be represented three ways: 1) a funder name and ROR ID 2) a funder name and funder identifier 3) an identifier only (funder identifier or ROR ID) or 4) just the funder name
If a funder name is supplied without an identifier, Crossref will attempt to match the name to an existing identifier. Because names alone are very ambiguous, if a match is not found that portion of the funding information will not be considered valid until the record is updated with an identifier, meaning the funder name will be passed through to our XML and JSON outputs but will not be found using the filters on funding information that we support via our REST API, or show up in our Open Funder Registry search.
Correct nesting of funder names and identifiers is essential as it significantly impacts how funders, funder identifiers, and award numbers are related to each other.
Award and grant information:
You should include a grant DOI and/or an award number in your funding metadata wherever possible - the grant DOI is recommended as it is a persistent identifier.
Supplying Crossref grant DOIs will connect funding data with our Grant Linking System.
Funding data structure
Funding data is supported in schema version 4.3.0 and up and has its own namespace (fr). The fundref namespace (xmlns:fr=https://www-crossref-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/fundref.xsd) must be included in the schema declaration:
Funding data consists of a series of nested <fr:assertion> tags with enumerated name attributes. The name attributes are:
fundgroup: used to group a funder and its associated award number(s) for items with multiple funders.
funder_name: name of the funding agency as it appears in the Funder Registry. Funder names that do not match those in the registry will be accepted to cover instances where the funding organisation is not listed.
ror: identifier of the funding agency as it appears in the Research Organisation Registry (ROR).
award_number: grant number or other fund identifier.
grant_doi: Crossref grant ID or other grant DOI, may be provided as a DOI or prefixed with https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/.
In addition to a funder_name, a ror or funder_identifier must be included for the funding data to be included in REST API filters and facets. Multiple funder_name, funder_identifier / ror, and award_number / grant_doi assertions may be included. Deposits with only an award_number assertion are not allowed.
Some rules will be enforced by the deposit logic instead of the XML schema, including:
Nesting of <fr:assertion> elements: the schema allows infinite nesting of the assertion element to accommodate nesting of an element within itself. Deposit code will only allow 3 levels of nesting (with attribute values of fundgroup, funder_name, and funder_identifier).
Values of different <fr:assertion> elements: funder_name, funder_identifier, ror,award_number and grant_doi have additional validation rules imposed:
funder_identifier and grant_doi are DOIs and must follow the basic DOI format: 10.xxxx/(doi suffix) or https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.xxxx/(doi suffix).
Only valid funder identifiers will be accepted: the funder_identifier value will be compared against the Open Funder Registry. If the funder_identifier is not found, the deposit will be rejected.
Funder and award number hierarchy
A relationship between a single funder and award_number or grant_doi is established by including assertions with a &<fr:program>.
In this example, a single funder (National Institute on Drug Abuse with ROR ID https://ror.org/00fq5cm18) is associated with award number JQY0937263:
<fr:programname="fundref"><fr:assertionname="funder_name">US Department of Energy
<fr:assertionname="funder_identifier">https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13039/100000015</fr:assertion></fr:assertion><fr:assertionname="grant_doi">10.46936/aps-182101/60010611</fr:assertion></fr:program>
If multiple funder and award combinations exist, each combination should be deposited within a fundgroup to ensure that the award number is associated with the appropriate funder(s). In this example, two groups exist:
Funder National Science Foundation with ROR ID https://ror.org/021nxhr62 is associated with award numbers CBET-106 and CBET-106, and
<fr:programname="fundref"><fr:assertionname="fundgroup"><fr:assertionname="ror">https://ror.org/021nxhr62</fr:assertion><fr:assertionname="award_number">CBET-106</fr:assertion><fr:assertionname="award_number">CBET-7259</fr:assertion></fr:assertion><fr:assertionname="fundgroup"><fr:assertionname="funder_name">Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy
<fr:assertionname="funder_identifier">https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13039/100006151</fr:assertion></fr:assertion><fr:assertionname="grant_doi">10.46936/rapd.proj.2016.49526/60006021</fr:assertion></fr:assertion></fr:program>
Nesting of names
An Open Funder Registry identifier may be provided alone or with a funder name. To associate a name with an identifier, the identifier must be nested within the funder_name assertion. If not nested, the name and identifier will be treated as two separate funders.
<fr:assertionname="funder_name">National Science Foundation
<fr:assertionname="funder_identifier">https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13039/100000001</fr:assertion></fr:assertion>
In this example, funder National Science Foundation is only identified by name. This submission will be successful but will not be included in REST API filters or the Open Funder Registry search unless the name provided can be matched with a funder identifier:
Award numbers (award_number) and grant DOIs (grant_doi) may be provided alone or in combination. A grant DOI is sufficient to identify an individual grant but an award number may be supplied as well provided the award number is nested within the grant_doi assertion.
Here, the award number ABC-123 is nested within grant DOI 10.32013/501100002241:
<fr:programname="fundref"xmlns:fr="http://www.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/fundref.xsd"><fr:assertionname="funder_name">American Academy of Clinical Toxicology
<fr:assertionname="funder_identifier">https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13039/100009524</fr:assertion></fr:assertion><fr:assertionname="grant_doi">10.32013/501100002241
<fr:assertionname="award_number">ABC-123</fr:assertion></fr:assertion></fr:program>
Fundgroups
fundgroup assertions are used to group different funder and award combinations. When contained within a single fundgroup, all funder name/ID combinations and awards (funder-specific awards or Grant DOIs) within the fundgroup will be associated together.
In the example below, funder National Institutes of Health is the funder of awards HL104101 and RO1HL137094. Dravet Foundation is in a distinct fundgroup and will not be associated with items in the first fundgroup.
Funding metadata can be deposited with Crossref in two ways:
In a stand-alone deposit where just the funding metadata is provided.
As part of the full set of metadata for an article.
When funding data is successfully deposited, an inserted identifier will appear as a message (<msg>) within the submission log:
<record_diagnosticstatus="Success"><doi>10.1016/j.apcatb.2018.04.081</doi><msg>Inserted identifier: 501100001809 for name: "the National Natural Science Foundation of China"
</msg>
Resource deposit
Resource deposits may be used to append or replace funding data for an existing metadata record. The deposit XML file contains just the DOI of the article and the specific funding data. Please note the following:
If the DOI record currently has any funding data it will be fully overwritten by the new data.
If the DOI currently has any Crossmark data, the new funding data will be inserted within the existing (previously deposited) Crossmark data.
Funding data may be deposited as part of a normal ‘full’ metadata XML deposit for a DOI.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><doi_batchversion="4.4.0"xmlns="http://www.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/schema/4.4.0"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/schema/4.4.0 http://www.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/schema/deposit/crossref4.4.0.xsd"xmlns:fr="http://www.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/fundref.xsd"><head><doi_batch_id>7ce0adc7155c63a5e2b-3ebc</doi_batch_id><timestamp>201610241300</timestamp><depositor><depositor_name>Crossref Support</depositor_name><email_address>support@crossref.org</email_address></depositor><registrant>Crossref</registrant></head><body><journal><journal_metadatalanguage="en"><full_title>Applied Physics Letters</full_title><abbrev_title>Appl. Phys. Lett.</abbrev_title><issnmedia_type="print">00036951</issn><coden>APPLAB</coden></journal_metadata><journal_issue><publication_datemedia_type="print"><month>09</month><day>10</day><year>2012</year></publication_date><journal_volume><volume>101</volume></journal_volume><issue>11</issue></journal_issue><journal_articlepublication_type="full_text"><titles><title>Total energy loss to fast ablator-ions and target capacitance of direct-drive implosions on OMEGA</title></titles><contributors><person_namesequence="first"contributor_role="author"><given_name>N.</given_name><surname>Sinenian</surname></person_name><person_namesequence="additional"contributor_role="author"><given_name>A. B.</given_name><surname>Zylstra</surname></person_name></contributors><publication_datemedia_type="online"><month>09</month><day>10</day><year>2012</year></publication_date><pages><first_page>114102</first_page></pages><programxmlns="http://www.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/fundref.xsd"><assertionname="ror">https://ror.org/021nxhr62</assertion><assertionname="grant_doi">10.46936/aps-182101/60010611</assertion></program><doi_data><doi>10.1063/1.4752012</doi><timestamp>20130806074500</timestamp><resource>http://scitation.aip.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/content/aip/journal/apl/101/11/10.1063/1.4752012
</resource></doi_data></journal_article></journal></body></doi_batch>
Updating or removing funding metadata
If funding metadata is incorrect or out-of-date, it may be updated by redepositing the funding metadata. Be sure to redeposit all available metadata for an item, not just the elements being updated. A DOI may be updated without resubmitting funding metadata, as previously deposited funding metadata will remain associated with the DOI.
Funding metadata may be deleted by redepositing an item with an empty <fr:program name="fundref"> element:
