Piecing together the Research Nexus: uncovering relationships with open funding metadata - Crossref

"The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. That’s how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.

As emphasised recently by Hans de Jonge from NWO, funding metadata’s value is in the transparency of the relationships it enables. The system is powered by the collective action of the research community– including research funders – that registers open metadata with Crossref, making these relationships possible. With close to 180,000 grant records in our corpus we wanted to know how far they reach and what story they tell.

In March 2022, we developed an approach for linking grants to research outputs and analysed how many such relationships could be established. Now we’re able to present the latest dataset that contains relationships between grants and research outputs, both those deposited by Crossref members and discovered by an automated matching strategy. It includes data deposited up to the end of July 2025.

This work is part of our ongoing Metadata Matching project."