Across the research community, there is growing recognition of the importance of open funding information. This momentum is reflected in the recent call to action from the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information to improve open funding metadata – see DataCite’s response on advancing open funding metadata with community infrastructure. As a community-driven open infrastructure provider, DataCite already supports organizations in creating and sharing funding metadata. Two such use case examples were featured at a DataCite Open Hours session on June 17. We heard from the new DataCite Member, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and from Dryad about its work through the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI). The session covered DataCite tools and services to share and track funding and highlighted new and upcoming developments.
Open funding metadata in GREI repositories
We began with an overview of how funding information is captured through the DataCite DOI registration process. The DataCite Metadata Schema supports connections between awards, recipients, funding organizations, and related research outputs through persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs for funders, ORCID iDs for researchers, and DOIs for research resources and activities. Rich funding metadata facilitates reporting on outputs and outcomes of the funding and supports development of open tools for analysis and discovery. This was emphasised in Dryad’s presentation, with funding information positioned as an integral part of GREI metadata recommendations. GREI repositories use the DataCite Metadata Schema as the foundation for harmonizing metadata practices across different platforms. By agreeing on a common set of metadata fields—including funding information—GREI repositories create more consistent, interoperable metadata that improves discovery of funded outputs and enables more effective reporting and compliance monitoring.
The presentation also highlighted how DataCite services help repositories assess and maximize the value of this metadata. The DataCite Metadata Dashboard, developed in concert with the GREI repositories, helps organizations monitor funding metadata quality and completeness, and identify high-impact improvements. Resulting rich metadata supports discoverability of funded outputs in platforms like DataCite Commons.
Advancing open science through Award DOIs with The Michael J. Fox Foundation
An important next step in strengthening open funding metadata is assigning PIDs to grants and awards. Funding organizations can use DataCite infrastructure to register award DOIs, enabling awards to be persistently identified and cited by their recipients. Award DOI records follow the DataCite Metadata Schema to capture wider funding context, including the funding organization, recipients, duration, amount, local identifiers, funding programme, etc. Combined with rich metadata, award DOIs make it easier to connect funding to publications, datasets, software, and other research outputs. These structured connections are surfaced through DataCite Commons and the REST API, supporting impact tracking, reporting, and broader landscape analysis of funded research. With more than 42 million DataCite DOIs already containing funding references, and with the growing adoption of award DOIs, the community is laying the foundations for a more connected and interoperable funding ecosystem.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research illustrated how funders can put this infrastructure into practice as part of a broader open science strategy. The presentation from Michael J. Fox Foundation framed open funding metadata as one of the key enablers of the open science transition. The foundation is expanding its open science policies to ensure that a much wider range of research outputs—including datasets, code, biosamples, and other resources—can be openly shared, discovered, and tracked over time.
A major component of this work is the adoption of DataCite award DOIs for historic and future awards. The Michael J. Fox Foundation is developing new tools and workflows to generate enriched metadata that not only improves the discoverability of funded research outputs, but also enables more robust assessment of their long-term impact. They see metadata as a way to help researchers more easily find and reuse existing resources, accelerate research, and support research integrity by making connections between funding and outputs more transparent. Ultimately, their goal is to build a standardized, PID-based infrastructure that automates tracking, improves recognition of all research contributions—not just publications—and enables better collaboration across funders and the wider research ecosystem.
Looking ahead for open funding metadata
The session concluded with an overview of recent and upcoming developments across DataCite services. Highlights included new REST API features that leverage ROR metadata to enhance discovery of research outputs at the country level, and enhancements to the Metadata Dashboard. Plans ahead will involve updates to community-driven metadata enrichments, API authentication options, citation and resolution reporting, and further improvements to the DataCite Metadata Schema, in particular for funding metadata.
The examples shared during this DataCite Open Hours session demonstrated that open funding metadata is a shared effort. Community infrastructure providers, repositories, and funding organizations each play a complementary role in creating persistent, interoperable connections between funding, researchers, organizations, and research outputs. As adoption of award DOIs continues to grow, these shared practices will make it easier to discover, assess, and demonstrate the impact of funded research. We look forward to continuing this work with our community as we develop new tools and services for funding information. We encourage you to explore these capabilities, contribute feedback on ongoing developments, and help shape the future of open funding metadata. We invite you to provide input and product suggestions regarding funding metadata through the DataCite Suggestions forum on GitHub. To hear more about use cases, the metadata schema and product developments, and other topics, join our DataCite community mailing list and sign up for one of our future Open Hours or other events. Please contact us if you are interested in joining DataCite to register award DOIs and work with open funding metadata.
