CrossRef, a US-based not-for-profit membership association of publishers, has announced FundRef, a pilot collaboration between scholarly publishers and funding agencies that will standardise the names of research funders and add grant numbers attributed in journal articles or other scholarly documents. The collaboration would allow researchers, publishers, and funding agencies to track the published research that results from specific funding bodies.
The international FundRef pilot participants include seven publishers and four funding organisations - US Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information (DOE/OSTI); US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); US National Science Foundation (NSF); and Wellcome Trust. The seven publishers include: American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Elsevier, IEEE, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Wiley.
The participants in the pilot project plan to create a proof of concept system that will demonstrate the workflow for how funding agency names and grant and award numbers will be standardized and linked to publications. The proof of concept should be available by October 2012.
