The availability and completeness of open funder metadata: Case study for publications funded by the Dutch Research Council

Abstract

Research funders spend considerable efforts collecting information on outcomes of the research they fund. To help funders track publication output associated with their funding, Crossref initiated FundRef in 2013, enabling publishers to register funding information using persistent identifiers. However, it is hard to assess the coverage of funder metadata because it is unknown how many articles are the result of funded research and therefore should include funder metadata. In this paper we looked at 5,004 publications reported by researchers to be the result of funding by a specific funding agency: the Dutch Research Council NWO. Only 67% of these articles contain funding information in Crossref, with a subset acknowledging NWO as funder name and/or Funder IDs linked to NWO (53% and 45%, respectively). Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Dimensions are all able to infer additional funding information from funding statements in the full text of the articles. Funding information in Lens largely corresponds to that in Crossref, with some additional funding information likely taken from PubMed. We observe interesting differences between publishers in the coverage and completeness of funding metadata in Crossref compared to proprietary databases, highlighting potential to increase the quality of open metadata on funding.