Research funding metadata is becoming part of the connective tissue of open research. Knowing who funded research, through which grant, and what that funding produced is essential for discovery, monitoring and evidence-based research policy. 

OpenAIRE is scaling the way it identifies funders, grants and the research they support by combining trusted external infrastructures, persistent identifiers and our own enrichment and validation workflows to make those connections both broader and more reliable. 

Doubling funding connections

The published August 2026 OpenAIRE Graph brings together 324 distinct funders, 3,907,759 identified grants and projects, and 5,962,728 funded research products. The project total excludes unidentified projects: records used when a funder can be recognised but a specific grant cannot yet be established.

The historical picture shows how this network has expanded. Recorded publication–grant links increased from 4.58 million in November 2023 to 9.89 million in August 2026, more than doubling over the period (+116%). Over the most recent year alone, publication–grant relations increased by 29%, from 7.68 million in August 2025 to 9.89 million in August 2026. These are relations, not distinct publications or grants, and changes between snapshots also reflect updates to coverage and processing. 

From one-to-one integrations to a connected ecosystem 

OpenAIRE has long worked directly with research funders to collect project information and connect it to research results. That remains important: funders can still contribute authoritative project metadata directly to OpenAIRE. 

But covering a rapidly growing international funding landscape cannot depend on one-to-one integrations alone. 

OpenAIRE is therefore increasingly building on shared community infrastructures and national research information systems, including Crossref funding metadata, national sources such as research.fi and SWECRIS and other authoritative project-data services, while adding the reconciliation, enrichment and linking needed to connect this information across the Graph. 

The aim is not to replace these infrastructures. It is to make their information work better together. 

From identifying a funder to identifying the grant 

Knowing that a publication acknowledges a funder is useful. Knowing which specific grant supported it is much more powerful. 

This is why OpenAIRE is strengthening grant-level identification through project identifiers, grant codes and increasingly Grant DOIs. 

Grant DOIs can help recognise the same project across different systems and connect research outputs to grants even when the DOI, rather than a traditional grant code, appears in scholarly metadata or acknowledgements. OpenAIRE’s current work includes DOI-based projectvo reconciliation, enrichment and research-output–project linking, with further harvesting and mining work continuing. 

Growing coverage while improving quality 

More data does not automatically mean better data. 

Funding metadata can contain duplicate identities, incomplete grant references, ambiguous funder names and incorrect links. OpenAIRE therefore combines aggregation with reconciliation, curation and, where appropriate, dedicated full-text mining. 

Recent Graph work illustrates both sides of this process: releases have expanded DOI-based project linking and inferred result–project relations, while another quality-control step removed more than one million invalid or duplicate funding relations. Growth and cleanup are both part of improving the Graph. 

This is also why OpenAIRE is systematically investigating project-data availability across Europe. A completed funder inventory has examined authoritative data sources and potential acquisition routes across 19 countries, distinguishing APIs and downloads from cases requiring direct contact or further technical work. The inventory provides a roadmap for future integrations, not a claim that every identified funder is already onboarded. 

The next step: funding metadata that travels 

The direction is clear: a funding ecosystem where identifiers and metadata can move reliably between funders, scholarly infrastructures and research outputs. 

OpenAIRE’s role is to connect, reconcile and enrich that information, supporting community standards and initiatives such as the Barcelona Declaration while giving funders, institutions and researchers a richer view of how funding connects to research. 

There is still work ahead. But OpenAIRE now has both the technical foundations and a systematic plan for scaling funding coverage without giving up the quality that makes those connections useful.