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We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.

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. 

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.

Click here for the version in Portuguese

Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugal’s main public funding agency, about the agency’s approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure. With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra “register once, reuse always”, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.

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.

This month marks one year since the Dutch Research Council (NWO) introduced grant IDs—an important milestone in our journey toward more transparent and trackable research funding. We created over 1,600 Crossref Grant IDs with associated metadata. We are beginning to see them appear in publications. These early examples show the enormous potential Grant IDs have. They also highlight that publishers could extend their efforts to improve the quality of funding metadata of publications.

Click here for the version in German

As a new Community Engagement Manager at Crossref, dedicated to working with the funders community, I frequently hear requests for examples and case studies of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) by ‘funders like us’. This has spurred me to start a series of blog posts presenting funders’ perspectives on joining Crossref and using our system – to demonstrate how it’s done. 

We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure.

Some organisations at the forefront of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System presented their challenges and how they overcame them, shared the benefits they are reaping from participating, and provided some tips about their processes and workflows.

One of the main motivators for funders registering grants with Crossref is to simplify the process of research reporting with more automatic matching of research outputs to specific awards. In March 2022, we developed a simple approach for linking grants to research outputs and analysed how many such relationships could be established. In January 2023, we repeated this analysis to see how the situation changed within ten months. Interested? Read on!

Why the focus on funding information?

We are often asked who uses Crossref metadata and for what. One common use case is researchers in bibliometrics and scientometrics (among other fields) doing meta analyses on the entire corpus of records. As we pass the 10 year mark for the Funder Registry and 5 years of funders joining Crossref as members to register their grants, it’s worth a look at some recent research that focuses specifically on funding information. After all, there is funding behind so much scholarly work it seems obvious that it would be routinely documented in the scholarly record. But it often isn’t and that’s a problem. These sources make clear the need for accurate funding information and the problems that the lack of it creates.