A key element of DataSalon’s PaperStack service is the automatic integration of Funder Registry data, to support understanding of the funding landscape, analysis of funding sources for articles, and the meeting of funder mandates. This month we answer some frequently asked questions about the registry and how it’s used within PaperStack.
What is the Funder Registry?
The Funder Registry is a free and open dataset of funding bodies across the world, developed by Crossref and maintained by Elsevier. It aims to standardise the way funders are referred to in research papers.
Who is it for?
In the metadata of content registered with Crossref, authors can reference each funder using the name and identifier from its record in the registry. This in turn benefits institutions following their researchers’ publications, publishers tracking who funds their authors, and funders monitoring the work they’ve funded.
How is it updated?
New versions of the registry are released around every 1-3 months. These releases include both new records and corrections to existing records. Anyone can request the addition of a missing funder, or report inaccuracies using the Crossref support centre contact form.
What is its coverage?
The current version of the registry contains just over 31,000 records. Although that may seem small compared with ROR (which has nearly 103,000 records) or Ringgold (which has over 586,000 records), this is partly due to its more specialised nature, and it does include institutions that don’t appear in ROR or Ringgold.
What information does it include?
All records have a unique identifier, a name, an institution type, and a country. More detailed location information is limited – there’s no city, but state is almost always populated for the United States, Canada and Australia. Alternative forms of the funder name (e.g. in different languages) are often recorded, and there is some information on parent/child relationships (although this doesn’t give the detailed hierarchical picture that can be built up from the Ringgold data).
How does DataSalon handle the data?
Before including the registry data in a PaperStack build, we remove defunct records and identify duplicate records (which we report to Crossref). We also link up the data with ROR and Ringgold, using both the Funder IDs that appear in those datasets and our own automatching tools. After each ROR or Ringgold update, we check any changed Funder IDs – this ensures that all the reference datasets used in PaperStack link up correctly.
How is the data used in PaperStack?
Article funders are automatically matched to the registry to provide clean profile data for each funder and to link up all data relating to that funder. The results of the automatching are regularly checked and improvements are constantly being made to ensure each article is linked to the correct funder. This allows PaperStack users to explore relationships between organizations, authors, reviewers and funders, and to analyse submissions by funder using PaperStack’s range of charts.
If you have a question about the Funder Registry and its use in PaperStack that we haven’t covered here, please do get in touch. Or find out more about the charts and other features available in PaperStack.
The DataSalon Blog 