3. Not-for-profit membership association of
scholarly publishers
All subjects, all business models
4000 international publishers
83 non-publisher affiliates, 2000 library affiliates
60 million DOIs
Tuesday, 21 May 13
4. A standard way of reporting funding
sources for published scholarly research
🌍🌍
Tuesday, 21 May 13
9. <fn fn-type="financial-disclosure">
<p>This work was supported in part by NIH
grant R01 GM094800B to G.J.J., a gift to Caltech from
the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and a stipend
from the Bayerische Forschungsstiftung to M.P. The
funders had no role in study design, data collection and
analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the
manuscript.</p>
</fn>
</fn-group>
</back>
</article>
Tuesday, 21 May 13
10. <body>
...
<sec>
<title>Funding</title>
<p>This work was supported by the
<grant-sponsor xlink:href="http://
www.grf.org" id="GS1">Generic
Research Foundation</grant-sponsor>,
the <grant-sponsor
xlink:href="http://www.energy.gov"
id="GS2">Department of Energy</grant-
sponsor> Office of Science grant
number <grant-num rid="GS2">DE-FG02-
04ER63803</grant-num>, and the
<grant-sponsor xlink:href="http://
www.nih.gov" id="GS3">National
Institutes of Health</grant-sponsor>.
</p>
</sec>
</body>
Tuesday, 21 May 13
11. National Institutes of Health
NIH? N.I.H.? National Institute of Health?
Abbreviations, misspellings, translations...
Tuesday, 21 May 13
13. Funding bodies cannot easily track the published
output of funding
Why does this matter?
Tuesday, 21 May 13
14. Funding bodies cannot easily track the published
output of funding
Publishers cannot easily report which articles result
from research supported by specific funders or grants
Why does this matter?
Tuesday, 21 May 13
15. Funding bodies cannot easily track the published
output of funding
Publishers cannot easily report which articles result
from research supported by specific funders or grants
Institutions cannot easily link funding received to
published output
Why does this matter?
Tuesday, 21 May 13
16. Funding bodies cannot easily track the published
output of funding
Publishers cannot easily report which articles result
from research supported by specific funders or grants
Institutions cannot easily link funding received to
published output
Lack of standard metadata for funding sources makes
it difficult to analyse or data mine
Why does this matter?
Tuesday, 21 May 13
22. FundRef Registry
4000 funder names and ID numbers from curated
Elsevier SciVal registry, donated to FundRef
Tuesday, 21 May 13
23. FundRef Registry
4000 funder names and ID numbers from curated
Elsevier SciVal registry, donated to FundRef
Hosted by CrossRef, available under CC0
Tuesday, 21 May 13
24. FundRef Registry
4000 funder names and ID numbers from curated
Elsevier SciVal registry, donated to FundRef
Hosted by CrossRef, available under CC0
Will be added to and updated
Tuesday, 21 May 13
25. FundRef Registry
4000 funder names and ID numbers from curated
Elsevier SciVal registry, donated to FundRef
Hosted by CrossRef, available under CC0
Will be added to and updated
Publishers to use this list to ensure consistency
Tuesday, 21 May 13
36. Implementation
1. Collect funding data from authors on submission using
FundRef Registry taxonomy
http://www.crossref.org/fundref
Tuesday, 21 May 13
37. Implementation
2. Pass funding data from submission system to production
systems
Publisher
Submission System
Grant Number
Funder
Tuesday, 21 May 13
38. Implementation
2. Pass funding data from submission system to production
systems
Publisher
Submission System
Grant Number
Funder
Production
Systems
Tuesday, 21 May 13
39. Implementation
3. Deposit FundRef data with CrossRef
CrossMark participants should
deposit FundRef data within
CrossMark deposits
CrossMark participation
recommended for standard
display of funding information
Tuesday, 21 May 13
51. Next Steps
Launching end of this month (May 2013)
Agree to FundRef Terms & Conditions:
www.crossref.org/fundref
No fees for FundRef deposits
Tuesday, 21 May 13
Today I ’ m going to be introducing and explaining the new FundRef initiative from CrossRef. I ’ m going to talk for about 30 minutes giving background to the project and then explaining what CrossRef members and their vendor partners need to do to participate in FundRef, and then we ’ ll have some time for questions. As we have a large number of people on the call I won ’ t take questions as we go along - please hold on to them for the end, or if you would like to type them in to the chat box in webex my colleague will pick them up for the questions session at the end.
So FundRef ’ s purpose is pretty simple - FundRef has been launched to provide a standard way of reporting funding sources for published scholarly research. I ’ m going to start by covering why this is important.
Let ’ s take a look at some sample articles. Many journals and other publications include the authors ’ acknowledgement of funding sources, but where and how this information is displayed varies widely. In this article it ’ s at the end just before the reference section, and in this article it tells you the source of the funding and the grant numbers.
...in this PDF article it ’ s below the abstract in a section labelled “ Funding ” . It names the organisation that funded the research, but doesn ’ t include a grant number.
...and in this one it ’ s at the end again in the acknowledgements section, and in this case does include an award number. The location of funding information varies from publication to publication - sometimes in the metadata, sometimes with the references or only in the full text behind a paywall. And it ’ s not just the placement of this information on the page, it ’ s also how it is formatted and displayed.
There are a couple of issues with the formatting of funding information in publications. One is that it ’ s mostly very hard to retrieve in any technical way - if you want to extract this information as part of the article ’ s metadata, or to search on it you will struggle because many publishers don ’ t mark this information up in their XML. Here ’ s an article with funding information at the top of the article. It has its own section and heading, so it stands out to the reader browsing the page, but if you look at the XML all of the information is thrown together as free text in a paragraph tag. This is not helpful to a machine that might be looking for this information.
And even when publishers do tag up funding information in their XML, as in this example, there are still problems. The tags are likely to vary from publisher to publisher - this publisher uses “ Grant Sponsor ” and “ Grant Num ” . Another might use “ Funding Source ” and “ Award Number ” . And not all publishers are making this information mandatory on submission, so there will be gaps where authors leave out grant numbers. On top of this there ’ s the lack of standardisation in naming of the funding bodies themselves...
When funding information is entered as free-form text by the author you are going to have inconsistencies - people will use abbreviations or alternative names or will misspell things. There ’ s no guarantee that you ’ ll be able to match up or de-duplicate the funding bodies and so a search for NIH might not return any publications that had reasearch supported by National Institutes of Health, and so on...
So why is this important? With all of these inconsistencies it ’ s very hard to search for funding information or to record and analyse the funding data. This has consequences for funding bodies who need to track the output of the research they support, and for publishers who want to be able to analyse the funding sources for the research that they publish.
So FundRef is a collaborative solution to this problem, devised by - and for the benefit of - both publishers and funders. Both parties have an interest in the outcomes of FundRed, and importantly, they have the systems and relationships to make it happen. Both have well-established processes - one for recording the distribution of funds and monitoring the research process, and the other for ingesting, processing and publishing the outcomes of the research.
We ’ ve just completed a year-long FundRef pilot that ran until March of this year, and involved these organisations - the publishers on the left, and the funding bodies on the right. On successful completion of the pilot project the CrossRef board approved the FundRef service to go into production, and we ’ re launching at the end of this month.
One of the key things that came out of the pilot and is central to the project is an agreed taxonomy of funding bodies. The FundRef Registry has been created from a list donated to the project by Elsevier, and currently consists of around 4000 international funder names. The list data is and will be freely available under a CC0 license waiver, and we will have a means for funding bodies to update their details and suggest new organisations or departments for the registry. This is the list that publishers will use to collect information from authors on submission.
To put this into context and explain in more detail how the process works: CrossRef hosts the funder registry which provides standard funder names to publisher submission systems. Publishers ask authors, at submission, to provide the name or names of the funding bodies and accompanying grant numbers. This funding information goes in to publishers ’ production systems where it is stored as tagged XML and submitted to CrossRef with all of the other deposited metadata for each piece of content. Once the funding information is in the CrossRef database it becomes a searchable, either through our search interfaces or via one of our APIs, and publishers, funders, and other interested parties can query on a funding organisation or grant number to discover the resultant publications, or can look up a piece of content using other metadata and find out the funding sources. Publishers will be able to display this funding information in a structured way. For those publishers who are participating in CrossMark, the funding data will automatically appear in the Record tab of the CrossMark dialogue box. We strongly encourage publishers submitting FundRef information to also participate in CrossMark, as this further standardises the location of the information for readers, but of course it can also be displayed on the publisher ’ s site in metadata and full text.
But the key piece is that the funding information is now centrally stored in the CrossRef database and can be queried. These three pieces of information - the DOI, the funding source or sources and award numbers are tied together in the metadata, making each of them discoverable via any of the other.
Using CrossRef Metadata search you can look up a DOI and find its funding sources, or look up a grant number to see which research it supported, or look up a funding body and see which publications have had research supported by that agency.
RESULTS SCREEN
The first thing that publishers need to do is collect the funding data from authors when they submit their paper. Submission of grant numbers should be encouraged but isn ’ t mandatory, and of course the author will need to be able to submit multiple grant numbers and multiple funders. There will need to be an option for “ no funding source ” and also the opportunity for authors to select “ other ” and input the name of the organisation if their source isn ’ t found in the registry. If they do this, the name they input will be stored in the CrossRef metadata and will be added to a list to be verified and added to the Registry.
Just to emphasise again that the funder name that the author submits should come from the FundRef Registry and should be the standardised version of that name. How you do this is up to you - our own pilot search system here suggests a list of names that in part match the name you have typed in, or you could some kind of auto-complete feature. The FundRef Registry can be downloaded as an RDF file from this address CHECK!, and will be updated XXX times a year.
Publishers then need to make sure that their production systems can ingest this additional data from their submission systems, ready to be deposited with CrossRef....
And that ’ s step three - deposit the funding information with CrossRef. We are strongly encouraging our members to also join CrossMark and submit the funding data as part of their CrossMark deposits. For CrossMark participants the funding data will automatically appear in the record tab of the CrossMark dialogue box, giving the advantage of standardisation across publisher websites for the reader, and automatically highlighting the publisher ’ s participation in FundRef.
This is an example of a FundRef deposit within a CrossMark deposit, which is the recommended way. You can see here I hope that were we ’ ve got a very simple CrossMark deposit and the FundRef data for one grant from one funding organisation. I should add that if you are considering joining CrossMark but you are concerned about gathering additional metadata for your CrossMark deposits that it ’ s perfectly acceptable to join now, deposit the minimum CrossMark data and your FundRef data, and then go back at a later date to enhance your CrossMark data with other information.
You don ’ t *have* to deposit FundRef data within CrossMark however. Here are two stand-alone examples, the top one is a simple funder name and identifier - both taken from the Registry, and the bottom example also includes an award number. The award number will be free-text as supplied by the author - we ’ re not doing any validation ofFurther examples and instructions, together with the updated deposit schema that incorporates FundRef can all be found on the CrossRef help pages
Then when this data is in the CrossRef database publishers, funders and other interested parties can search on it, either through our metadata search or using one of our query APIs. CrossRef Metadata Search is open to anyone, our HTTP query API requires a simple one-time registration but is also free.
So I hope I ’ ve been able to give you a clear overview of FundRef and how to participate. We are launching FundRef at the end of this month, just a few weeks from now. We are seeing a lot of interest in having a central, standardised store for funding information - it will be a huge benefit to all of those involved in the funding of research and the publicaiton of research outcomes. We really want to encourage CrossRef member publishers to sign up sooner rather than later so that we can build up this database of funding information over the coming months. There are no fees for FundRef deposits - we simply ask that member publishers agree to a set of Terms and Conditions, which will be available very soon as a click-through agreement on the CrossRef website. Mention FundRef advisory group overseeing future developments.