The research community has adopted standard persistent identifiers (PIDs)—for people (e.g. ORCID) and digital object identifiers (DOIs) for research and other published outputs. But until just recently, the record of the grant award was not captured in a consistent way across funders worldwide. These awards were not easily linked up with the literature or with researchers or with institutions.
CrossRef changed that in 2019 with the launch of its DOI registration service for grants, which provides a persistent public identifier for grants and associated metadata like citations for a publication. Having grant DOIs enables researchers to acknowledge a specific grant when publishing — rather than just the name of the funder. For grant makers and the research community this open information about award investment enables connections between funding and outputs.
Altum and its funders on ProposalCentral are at the forefront of this change. In 2020, Altum became a sponsoring partner of CrossRef, and built grant DOI registration into the ProposalCentral platform, enabling funding organizations to easily and automatically connect their grants with published outputs.
Four grant makers have already registered over 250 grant DOIs, and today, the Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA) became the first funder on ProposalCentral to successfully register all its active awards.
“By establishing Crossref DOIs for our grants, we’re able to accurately track the outcomes of our funding and the impact our researchers are having throughout their careers,” said Kristen Mueller, PhD, Senior Director, Scientific Program at the Melanoma Research Alliance.
How it works: For funders on ProposalCentral who choose to participate, each award is registered with Crossref with a DOI. The DOI for the grant is both a persistent identifier and a link to additional details about the award, which the funder chooses to make open and public. The DOI and associated grant metadata is made available via Crossref to publishers, repositories, and anyone else interested in using the information.
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