What's the problem?

The importance of openly available funding metadata about research funding is widely recognized. This matters for research transparency: how and by which organizations was research funded? But it's also crucial for tracking research funding impact: what outcomes actually result from research investments? Research funders are increasingly asked to account for this.

Since 2013, Crossref has offered its members the ability to deposit funding information as part of a publication's DOI metadata. However this information remains highly incomplete with some publishers that deposit funding information for all their publications, but many only for some of their journals, or not at all.

This is despite the fact that publishers often have access to this information because authors include this in their paper's acknowledgement section to meet their funder requirements. It's estimated that in 25% of cases, publishers fail to transfer this information to Crossref.

The Funding Metadata Checker is a tool that makes it easy to identify discrepancies between what's included in the funding acknowledgement and what's been deposited with Crossref.

Why this matters

Complete and accurate open funding metadata enables:

• Better research discovery: Funders and institutions can identify all outputs from their investments
• Accountability and impact assessment: Research organizations can demonstrate the outcomes of their funding
• Compliance monitoring: Ensure authors and publishers meet open science requirements
• Research analytics: Enable comprehensive analysis of funding patterns and research outputs
• Transparency: Make the connections between funding and research visible to the public

When funding metadata is incomplete or missing, these benefits are lost—making it harder to track research impact, justify investments, and ensure transparency in the research ecosystem.

How it works

The tool is straightforward:

• Enter a DOI
• The tool attempts to retrieve the article's fulltext and extract the funding acknowledgement section
• Simultaneously, it queries Crossref for funding metadata
• Both are displayed side by side

Crossref metadata shows:

• Funder_name (as registered)
• Funder_ID (persistent identifier for the funding organization)
• Award (grant number or grant ID)

Understanding the results

When results differ, several scenarios are possible:

Acknowledgement shown, but no Crossref metadata: The article contains a funding section, but the publisher has not extracted this information (or did so incompletely) and has not passed it to Crossref. Many publishers rely on third-party providers for this extraction.

No acknowledgement shown, but Crossref metadata present: The tool likely couldn't extract the acknowledgement section. See Limitations below.

What you can do

If you're a researcher or author:

• Check your own publications to see if funding metadata is complete
• If metadata is missing, contact the publisher to request they deposit it with Crossref
• Ensure your funding acknowledgements are clear and complete in future submissions

If you're a publisher:

• Review your metadata workflows to ensure funding information is consistently extracted and deposited
• Consider implementing automated extraction tools or improving existing processes
• Prioritize complete metadata as part of your commitment to open science

If you're a research funder:

• Monitor compliance with your metadata requirements across funded outputs
• Use this tool to identify gaps in your funded research portfolio
• Engage with publishers to improve metadata quality for your grants

If you're a librarian or research administrator:

• Use this tool to check institutional research outputs
• Advocate for better metadata practices with publishers in publisher negotiations
• Support researchers in ensuring their funding is properly acknowledged

Limitations

The Funding Metadata Checker scrapes the HTML version of articles, not PDFs. It works best with open access articles, though sometimes funding acknowledgements on paywalled article landing pages are also accessible and will be displayed.

Some publishers actively block scraping of their article landing pages or encrypt article HTML, preventing extraction. For these articles, the tool will return an error message. This doesn't necessarily mean the article lacks funding metadata.

The completeness and quality of Crossref metadata depends entirely on what publishers deposit.

Technical details

The Funding Metadata Checker is powered by ScrapingBee (fulltext extraction) and the Crossref API (metadata retrieval).

The code is open source and available on GitHub.