Pilot aims to standardise funding information

CrossRef has announced FundRef, a pilot collaboration between scholarly publishers and funding agencies to standardise the names of research funders and add grant numbers attributed in journal articles or other scholarly documents. The collaboration should allow researchers, publishers, and funding agencies to track the published research that results from specific funding bodies.

The FundRef pilot includes seven publishers (American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Elsevier, IEEE, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, and Wiley) and four funding organisations (US Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information [DOE/OSTI]; US National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA]; US National Science Foundation [NSF]; and Wellcome Trust).

'Although publishers almost always include an acknowledgements section in their journals, where authors credit their funding sources, the lack of standardisation of funding organisations names and their abbreviations make it very difficult to use that information for reporting or analysis,'explained CrossRef executive director Ed Pentz. 'FundRef will address this challenge.'

The participants in the pilot project plan to create a proof of concept system that will demonstrate the workflow for how funding agency names and grant and award numbers will be standardised and linked to publications. The proof of concept should be available by October 2012.