Open funder metadata is essential for true research transparency

December 18, 2025

republished from LSE Impact Blog

October saw two important publications advocating for greater transparency in how research funding is acknowledged. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) released best practices for journals on formatting funding statements, while the International Science Council (ISC) linked funding transparency to combating mis- and disinformation. Though welcome contributions to the debate, both documents overlook a critical aspect: the need for funding information as open metadata.

The current landscape of funding statements

Many organisations in scholarly publishing have made recommendations for including funding sources as a required element of scientific work. Journals increasingly require funding information in manuscript submissions, while research funders often include declaration requirements in their grant conditions.

The COPE’s discussion document provides an excellent overview of why these statements matter. For readers of scientific literature, the transparency provided by these statements helps assess potential conflicts of interest. For funders, it enables tracking of their investments. And for grantees, it demonstrates how funding was used—important information for subsequent grant applications.

COPE notes that requirements vary significantly across organisations and recommends that funding statements should, “at minimum, include: the funding organization’s name, a specific grant number or identifier, the names of funded authors, and a description of the direct link between the funder and the paper”. COPE emphasises publishers’ responsibility to apply these standards across their journal portfolios, while editors must ensure that authors submit this information and that it gets published accurately.

The disinformation context

The vital importance of open funding metadata becomes even clearer when considering the ISC’s recent statement. The ISC frames funding transparency within the urgent context of misinformation and disinformation.

The ISC highlights the “playbook” phenomenon—strategies where the relationship between funding sources to research is disguised, misleading the public into believing studies were conducted independently of commercial or other interests. These tactics are widely known to be employed by commercial organisations. But ICS also cites cases where governments engage in the spread of misinformation, to advance their anti-science agendas. The UN designated Countering Disinformation as a major priority by 2022, and the ISC rightly identifies transparent funding information as a crucial element of this effort.

The critical gap – open funding metadata

What is markedly missing from these otherwise excellent recommendations is the importance of open funding metadata. While funding acknowledgments in research outputs such as articles provide transparency to individual readers, real transparency emerges only when funding information becomes available as open metadata at scale.

The difference is crucial: a funding statement in research outputs such as an article serves one reader at a time. Open funding metadata enables researchers, institutions, and the public to analyse funding patterns across thousands of research outputs, systematically identify potential conflicts of interest, verify claims about research independence, and track the impact of funding investments across entire fields. It also enables the inclusion of this information in open bibliographic databases and search engines, such as OpenAlex, further helping discovery and analysis.

Funding statements – more than just words

Funders as the authoritative and trusted source of funding information on the one hand need to ensure their funding information is provided as structured, open and interoperable data. The registration and use of a persistent identifier such as the Crossref Grant ID, a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for funding metadata, represent an important best-practice approach in this regard. When funders systematically register grants with persistent identifiers and make this information openly available, they create a foundation that publishers and infrastructure providers such as repositories can reliably build upon when depositing output metadata.

Publishers and infrastructure providers on the other hand need to systematically collect funding information in output metadata and should register funding information alongside a publication’s DOI: the funder’s name, preferably with a persistent identifier, and specific award numbers. However, despite this capability existing for over a decade, adoption of the registration of funding metadata as part of output metadata remains patchy. Data shows that some publishers deposit funding information for nearly all publications, while dozens of others don’t participate at all or only for a selection of journals. Similarly, while funders increasingly make use of grant DOIs, publishers are often not including these in publication metadata, even when authors do include them in funding acknowledgements.

It’s disappointing that the enormous potential of this system remains insufficiently used. A working group of signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information is working to improve this situation. As a recent roundtable session revealed, publishers recognise the importance of funding metadata registration with Crossref but sometimes face technical challenges in collecting this metadata in their workflows. Overcoming these challenges should be a priority for publishers and their infrastructure providers. If the two parties—funders and publishers—both play their parts, they trigger connections to be made programmatically through the Crossref system; this upstream data quality is essential for downstream transparency.

Realising open funder metadata

The COPE and ISC documents both make valuable contributions, highlighting the importance of funding transparency. Building on this, the scholarly communication community must recognise that including funding statements in articles, while necessary, is insufficient. Funding information as open metadata creates high value for the whole research community and for society at large. Publishers and infrastructure providers need to commit to depositing funding metadata with output metadata in Crossref as standard practice.

The technology exists. The standards are being discussed as part of various initiatives, including the Barcelona Declaration. What’s needed now is widespread adoption and a recognition that true funding transparency requires open metadata.