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Guides for Funders

How to join OpenAIRE

Small steps towards big results

Join OpenAIRE

To join OpenAIRE, a limited metadata set is required from funders in simple file formats (e.g., .csv, .xlsx, .tsv, .json, etc.) formalised via a Memorandum of Understanding. No personal or private details are required. Alternatively, many funders provide us with an API or a website from where we can download the project metadata directly and update them periodically. We can also import your project data from Crossref if you have registered your funding data with the Open Funder Registry (OFR).

You can see the funders already integrated in OpenAIRE by visiting the OpenAIRE EXPLORE Funders page.

The mandatory and optional data fields are:

Mandatory:
  • Project identifier
  • Project title or acronym
  • Funder name (e.g. Wellcome Trust, EC)
  • Start date
  • End date
Optional:
  • Funding stream(s) – funding categories for more detailed statistics
  • Organization(s) involved
  • Recommended acknowledgement statements
  • Start year/date Open Access mandates for datasets and publications
  • Project’s description
  • Budget of the projects*
  • Budget per participant*

* Budget information supports the realisation of monitoring services for the institutions.

Project titles or acronyms (valid for EC funding but does not apply to all funders) can be used by the text mining algorithm to calculate a more precise confidence to any matches to project numbers that are found; false matches can also be more easily identified and rejected when additional information is present.

For a detailed description of the project metadata fields that funders can provide OpenAIRE, please see this file.

Integration steps

If you are a funder, contact us by filling in this

We will get in touch with you to discuss the best way you prefer to provide your project metadata (as described in the section “Join OpenAIRE”) and send you the “Memorandum of Understanding” to be signed and accompany the list of your projects.

Once we have obtained the funder’s projects there is a 2 weeks period on average for analysing the data.

Funder’s and NOADs provide feedback before and after displaying data on Beta, Production and Monitor.

monitor integration steps

Understand the Benefits

The content aggregation process from many different sources, from Europe and beyond, enables to cover all the European and International area. Thus, it allows scientific output cross-linked with different funders to produce advanced statistics and indicators (e.g., co-funded research results, research trends, etc.).

Ultimately our concern is to:
  • Assist in the monitoring of open research results;
  • Reveal research clusters and trends for better return on investment for all European citizens;
  • More analytics and trends based on open protocols and agreements with repositories;
  • Retrieve repository content (text in pdf or xml) and apply text mining algorithms to perform advanced research analytics.

Making a difference

By joining OpenAIRE MONITOR, funders have the opportunity to make a difference by gaining comprehensive insights into the impact of their research funding, making evidence-based decisions, fostering collaboration, promoting open science, and influencing research policy. Together with the OpenAIRE community, funders can drive positive change and unlock the full potential of research for the benefit of society.

As a funder you can support the scholarly communication environment via these concrete steps:

  • Support repositories to include funding information in their bibliographic metadata. This helps join up systems! (Please refer to the OpenAIRE Guidelines which provide guidance on how to specify funding information).
  • Expose basic and public information (i.e., Funder name / Project ID) to repositories.

If this happens, everything can be streamlined. Results can be automatically monitored and reported back to funders.

Last updated date: December, 2023
Publication date: May, 2019

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