PIDapalooza 2018

Research is supported in a variety of ways- through grants, endowments, secondments, loans use of premises/equipment and even crowd-funding. In any of these cases, it is important to be able to link researchers and research outputs to details about the sources of support. This is true for prosaic reasons- to understand ROI, to map the competitive landscape, to ensure that mandates are fulfilled, to avoid double payment. But it is also true for epistemic reasons- understanding how research was funded can help contextualise that research, and help expose potential conflicts of interest or specific agendas.

We already have the Open Funder Registry which at least provides a coarse mapping between research and funders, but it is becoming clear that we need more fine-grained mapping directly to information about the kind of support that was provided. Crossref is working with DataCite and ORCID to build off the work we did on the Open Funder Registry and create an interoperable PID that will map to information about how funders support specific research. This talk will describe what we’ve learned so-far and how we plan to proceed. Hint- don’t call them “grant IDs.”