Advancing Open Funding Metadata With Community Infrastructure – Response to Barcelona Declaration Call to Action

Open funding metadata is crucial for research transparency, revealing potential conflicts of interest and supporting accountability. Rich public information about research funding helps trace its societal impact, reduces administrative burden on researchers, and enables a better understanding of the research landscape. Despite its importance, gathering high-quality open funding metadata remains challenging. From limited incentives and fragmented community practices to technical challenges and capacity constraints, addressing these issues requires coordination across the research ecosystem.

Recognizing the existing need to improve open funding metadata, the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information recently published a call to action. The call details recommendations on the adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for awards, standardization of workflows, and sustainable infrastructure and technology solutions. These guidelines closely align with DataCite's mission as a community-led open infrastructure provider and as a formal supporter of the Barcelona Declaration. In this post, we reflect on the recommendations outlined in the call, identifying alignment and highlighting opportunities for improvements.

DataCite as a source of open funding metadata

The action plan calls for infrastructure providers to develop guidance, infrastructure, and tools that would support their communities in sharing rich funding metadata. DataCite members can connect research outputs, resources, and activities to the information on financial support and the funding organizations. This includes connections to projects, data management plans and pre-registration reports, instruments and facilities, as well as publications, datasets, and software. The DataCite Metadata Schema enables the deposition of structured funding metadata that includes PIDs for funders, such as Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs and Crossref Funder Registry IDs. Nearly 43 million DataCite DOIs have funding information attached, with over 260,000 works connected to funders through PIDs. 

This growing body of funding metadata is openly available through DataCite services, including DataCite Commons, the REST API, OAI-PMH service, and the Public and Monthly Data Files. With these services, users can explore, analyze, and reuse funding information across the scholarly ecosystem. To further support organizational-level reporting, DataCite offers flexible querying tools in DataCite Commons and REST API, leveraging organizational metadata from ROR and PIDs for funders. Specialized facets allow users to explore outputs funded by organizational institutes, units, and programs.

DataCite support for award DOIs

Recommendations outlined in the Barcelona Declaration call to action also focus on lowering barriers for the adoption of award DOIs. Award DOIs are globally unique, persistent and resolvable, and can supplement internal award identifiers to enable impact tracking, simplify reporting, and support integrations with research information systems. Since 2024, DataCite supports DOI registration for funding, grants, scholarships, and other types of awards, as a distinct resource type. To ensure support for key use cases, guidelines for registering DataCite DOIs for awards have been developed in close collaboration with several partner organizations, including Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), California Digital Library (CDL), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and the Commission for Research Information in Germany (KFiD). Community input has helped shape a more flexible approach to award metadata that accommodates different types of institutions and funding schemes in terms of structure, complexity, and types of resources being awarded. For example, it is possible to register DOIs for non-monetary awards that allocate a resource, such as the usage of instruments or facilities.

Within the DataCite ecosystem, award DOIs can be connected to a wide range of related research entities through connection metadata. In addition to linking awards with publications, datasets, and software, award DOIs can also be associated with projects, data management plans, pre-registration reports, instruments, and research facilities. These connections can be established not only by funders, but also by publishers, repositories, and institutions, resulting in a rich graph of research knowledge.

Recognizing that DOI registration using the REST API can present a technical barrier for some organizations, DataCite members can easily implement Award DOI workflows with DataCite Fabrica's user-friendly web interface. DataCite can support funders with custom landing pages for award DOIs, if the organization does not yet have the necessary infrastructure in place. Here is an example of an award DOI registered by the Navigation Fund (https://doi.org/10.71707/yj21-5d60) that links to a corresponding landing page in DataCite Commons.

Award DOI fees can also present financial barriers. Recognizing this, DataCite has introduced a new membership model, which transitions away from a DOI-centric pricing structure. This makes it easier for organizations to register DOIs for all of the many outputs and output types that they steward, without imposing artificial limits based on quantity or output type. The new collective funding model focuses on supporting shared open infrastructure, and enables organizations to register up to 100,000 DOIs annually as part of their membership service. 

DataCite enrichments of funding metadata

While funding metadata coverage continues to increase, it is important to develop new strategies to address remaining gaps. The Barcelona Declaration call to action promotes the implementation of enrichment algorithms to capture missing relationships between funding and resulting outputs. This is an area where infrastructure providers can play an important enabling role. DataCite is closely involved in the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET), a community initiative focused on improving the completeness, quality, and interoperability of open scholarly metadata through collaborative enrichment workflows. Rather than relying solely on the original metadata depositor to maintain records over time, COMET explores models that allow trusted community stakeholders to contribute metadata improvements. 

Through our collaboration with COMET, DataCite has already added 26.9 million enrichment records available through a new enrichments endpoint of the DataCite REST API. New enrichments, for example, resulting from an ongoing project to improve funding metadata, will be added in the future. This will allow us to augment existing funding metadata in DataCite and strengthen connections between funders, awards, organizations, and research outputs across the research ecosystem.

An outlook for open funding metadata

Improving open funding metadata is a shared responsibility that requires collaboration across funders, publishers, research institutions, and infrastructure providers. The recommendations outlined by the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information provide an important framework for advancing this work, and closely align with DataCite's ongoing efforts to support open, connected, and interoperable research information. While important challenges remain, continued investment in persistent identifiers, community-led infrastructure, and collaborative metadata enrichment will help create a more transparent and reusable funding information landscape for the global research community.

If you are interested in learning more about DataCite's efforts in supporting and improving open and connected funding metadata, join our upcoming DataCite Open Hours on June 17. We will hear from two DataCite members about their experience using DataCite services to create and consume open funding information. Josh Gottesman, Program Lead at Michael J Fox Foundation, will share their motivation behind registering DOIs for awards, while Audrey Hamelers, Senior Software Developer at Dryad, will provide an overview of funding metadata practices and standards development within the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI). We look forward to seeing you there and continuing the conversation around open, connected funding metadata.