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Wellcome and Europe PMC: supporting Open Research through open metadata

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza, Hannah Hope, Melissa Harrison – 2025 December 15

In CommunityGrant Linking SystemResearch FundersResearch Nexus

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.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

Hannah: The motivation for Crossref Grant IDs is to be able to disaggregate research outputs between funders. Funders’ grant identifiers come in a range of formats, funders might change them over time, and there are also similarities between funders’ names, which is a challenge. Permanent identifiers, in this case, Crossref Grant IDs, are an opportunity to avoid some of the confusion if we were able to implement them throughout the research ecosystem.

This is also being discussed in different contexts, for example, within the Barcelona Declaration working groups, funders and other stakeholders are exploring the diverse motivations that exist to implement changes into our workflows, as well as the challenges that funding metadata and persistent grant IDs can help solve.

The way Wellcome implemented the Grant Linking System is a bit unique, given that it partnered with Europe PMC for the technical implementation and metadata registration with Crossref. Can you tell us more about how it works?

Hannah: The collaboration between Wellcome and Europe PMC in the implementation of Crossref’s Grant Linking System started because they already had the grants landing page feature ready and available to us.

There was an initial hope that other funders of Europe PMC, which also have these grant landing pages, could then leverage that same system to make Crossref grant IDs more broadly available to the research community, but I am not sure if that has materialised yet.

Melissa: Currently we are supporting Wellcome’s implementation of Crossref grant IDs, but the infrastructure remains available to other Europe PMC funders should they decide to take advantage of it. We already have funding metadata for Europe PMC funders because it is a requirement for grantees to select their grant identifier when submitting their accepted manuscripts for indexing and archiving. As we already have that metadata, naturally we can pull it together and send it to Crossref, along with the link to the Europe PMC grant landing pages!

An additional benefit of partnering with Europe PMC is the comprehensive metadata we deliver to Crossref with the grant IDs. For example, we have invested in supplementing affiliation data with ROR iDs and we deliver to Crossref all the data we have that matches their schema for grant data.

How is Wellcome leveraging the funding metadata and Crossref grants IDs that are being shared and registered with Crossref?

Hannah: We are discussing internally how we can better socialise the Crossref grant DOIs among the grantees, either via our grant management system or through Europe PMC. One place where the Crossref grant DOIs are being used and shared is through our publishing platform, Wellcome Open Research. The Crossref grant DOI is included in the publication metadata, ensuring that the research output is linked to the funding via the open metadata registered.

However, as we use Europe PMC as our repository for funded written research outputs, these outputs are aggregated alongside the grant records which includes the Crossref grant DOI, facilitated by Europe PMC APIs. So we have the means to link the two things together.

Melissa: There are some UX and technical blockers to fully integrate Crossref grant IDs within the Europe PMC grant system currently that are detrimental to the utility of these IDs, for example, you can’t search for a specific grant in Europe PMC grant finder using a Crossref grant ID. We are partnering with Crossref to solve these challenges and offer users more functionality in this space next year.

Hannah: Beyond eLife and Wellcome Open Research, I am not sure which publishers use Crossref grants DOIs in their workflows.

Rocio: That’s an interesting question, as we aren’t seeing a massive flow of Crossref grant IDs in the works metadata records just yet. We are exploring with publishers and their service providers how to make this business-as-usual, and in the meantime, we are running a series of matching projects to ensure that, when possible, we make those connections ourselves to enrich the metadata with funding information. We already insert reciprocal relationships where one record asserts a link with another (in this case, where either a grant Finances a work or a work isFinancedBy a grant record, Crossref adds in the reverse). Improving and enriching these relationships directly in the metadata makes sure that metadata provided by funders can make their way to the research outputs that originate from the grant.

Wellcome is streamlining the way of asking grantees to report on their publications, facilitated by Europe PMC. Can you tell us a bit more about how this will work and what role metadata will play?

Hannah: We will stop asking researchers to report their publications directly to us as part of progress and end-of-grant reporting. We believe there is sufficient open metadata with high-quality tagging in the ecosystem for us to collect written research outputs programmatically from this public data. Under our new system, we will be directing researchers to look at their grant record within Europe PMC and make sure that their written research outputs are properly linked there; otherwise, we won’t see them. We are trying to leverage open data, existing infrastructure, and a route that enables us to improve the completeness of open metadata.

There aren’t many mechanisms that enable our researchers to add assertions to funding and research output records retrospectively, and Europe PMC offers us that opportunity, and that is really critical for us. Rather than collecting information in our own system, we can contribute to enhancing the global corpus of knowledge and the quality of open metadata more broadly. Since correcting metadata at source isn’t easy, Europe PMC presents us with an opportunity to contribute to that system.

Melissa: We are thinking broadly about this problem; many institutions curate their research information in spreadsheets or closed CRIS systems and struggle to make it publicly available. We are thinking about how Europe PMC can be leveraged to be a public home for that data. EMBL-EBI hosts Europe PMC and utilises it as the institutional repository, so we have started a pilot project to add ROR IDs for affiliations to EMBL-authored publications within Europe PMC. This is manually curated, high-quality metadata that would otherwise be lost from the public ecosystem.

If you look into the future, what would your hopes be for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general? What do you think that we could achieve collectively as a community?

Melissa: It would be amazing (!) if everybody, from funders to publishers, to institutions and authors, would coalesce around the Crossref Grant Linking System, and add to metadata exchange workflows – you would potentially have a very clean and clear picture of where the money is going, what the outputs are, and how they relate.

Currently, even with the Open Funder Registry, there is ambiguity around funder names - for example, different geographical national funders sharing the same exact name as their counterpart in another country - so even with the best will in the world, funder institutions could be misidentified in systems and assigned the wrong identifier. The Crossref Grant Linking System facilitates complete disambiguation because grants are associated with the issuing funder’s correct identifier, ensuring traceability of outputs and funding and enabling more precise, cleaner metadata.

Hannah: I think that is a bit of the Holy Grail and in reality, its a bit messy, there isn’t just one system! We need to be able to move past the chicken and egg discussion, where we talk about the use of different identifiers, with sometimes competing priorities. For me, the real challenge for the metadata community is how do we enrich metadata, correct errors, and develop greater interoperability between PID systems. So that multiple parties can contribute towards the creation of a greater whole record, rather than relying on a single owner of the record to provide all the information. If we could all, funders included, connect information from individual partners to create a unified record at the end of it, we could have better records and probably save time by distributing the workload.

What would you say to colleagues in other funders about investing in open metadata?

We all need information from other partners in the ecosystem and investing in our own internal system will not give us the same return as collectively investing in opening up that information wherever possible.

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We are very grateful to Hannah Hope and Melissa Harrison for their perspectives on open funding metadata and the role of the community in ensuring a complete and comprehensive Research Nexus.