As publishers begin to include Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs in the metadata deposited with DOIs, we have updated ouringestion and enrichment capabilities to ensure those records are recognized and connected to research outputs. This improves the metadata we aggregate and gives our funders, institutions, publishers, and service providers even better reporting capabilities and transparency.
Incomplete or inconsistent funding information makes it even more challenging for funders and other stakeholders to identify and report on the open access status of published research, and ultimately whether the published output meets their compliance requirements. These connections are essential to transparency and to helping funders, institutions, publishers, service providers and society as a whole find and access this metadata.
Reliable funder identification is integral to metadata linking, making this possible. Our freely available funder dashboards give visibility of funded research.
Identifier Adoption is Changing
In September 2023, Crossref announced a long-term transition from Open Funder Registry towards ROR in 2023 and in March 2025 began accepting ROR IDs in metadata fields where members had placed Funder IDs. Legacy Funder IDs remain supported during the transition, while ROR IDs can identify funders without needing a separate funder name in the record.
We began incorporating ROR information into our funder metadata workflows in November 2023, following the announcement. Throughout 2026, we have seen more publisher records containing ROR IDs but some with no corresponding funder name. Our ingestion process now recognizes funding blocks so we can identify a funder by name, a legacy Crossref Funder ID or a ROR ID. By using the ROR API, we can retrieve the organization’s name and complete the record. But where no ROR ID is available, we can add the organization name when there is an exact name match or established relationship to ensure better quality metadata and reporting. Correctly structuring funder names, identifiers, and award numbers remains essential for continued linking and metadata hygiene. Our next phase is to match the metadata archive for more completeness and to bring the archive inline with our evolving practices.
From Adapting to Making Open Research Work
Our experience raises a wider question for the scholarly communications community, “how can organizations make funding metadata more reliable at the point it is created, rather than updating and resubmitting the metadata post-publication?”
Our work across publisher records and funder information pinpoints where the metadata succeeds, fails, and what better practices can look like. As a non-profit member body supporting multiple stakeholders across the open research community, advancing the conversation and improving the capabilities of funders, institutions, publishers and the wider research ecosystem is essential to making open research work. Upstream improvements make the biggest difference to those downstream.
As identifiers and practices evolve, so does our role as we adapt our own systems to ensure funders, institutions, publishers, service providers, and other key stakeholders help build more reliable, trusted, and transparent connections to funded research.
Our openly available CHORUS Funder Dashboards enable you to review funded research from 14 funders from Australia, Japan and the US.
How It Works – The Details
We continue to ingest DOI records with funding metadata through the Crossref REST API and our process now recognizes three alternative ways in which a Crossref record can provide funder identification: a funder name, a funder DOI, or a ROR ID.
As of September 2026, a DOI record is eligible for ingestion into the CHORUS system when its Crossref metadata contains at least one funding block with one or more of the following:
- funder name – a textual name identifying the funding organization
- funder DOI – a persistent DOI identifying the funder
- ROR ID – a persistent identifier linking to an organization record in ROR
These criteria enable us to recognize funding information regardless of which supported identifier or name is supplied. They also reduce the risk of overlooking relevant records when publishers provide ROR IDs or funder DOIs without a corresponding funder name.
The additional metadata enrichment process we have adopted supports three principal scenarios:
| Enrichment process | How it works | Intended benefit |
| Funder name enrichment from ROR ID | When a Crossref funding block contains a ROR ID but no funder name, CHORUS queries the ROR API to retrieve the associated organization name and populate the missing name where a valid match is found. | Ensures that records containing ROR IDs can also display a recognizable funder name. |
| Funder ROR ID population from funder name | When a funding block contains a funder name but no ROR ID, CHORUS performs an exact match against the ROR database. When a unique match is found, the corresponding ROR ID is added to the record. | Increases the availability of persistent identifiers and improves consistency across records. |
| Funder name enrichment from funder DOI | When a Crossref record supplies a funder DOI without a funder name, CHORUS uses the funder DOI to retrieve the associated funder name and populate the missing metadata where the relationship can be established. | Preserves the usability of funding information when publishers supply a DOI rather than a textual name. |
These processes complement the funding metadata publishers supply as part of their metadata deposits with DOIs rather than replacing the Crossref ingestion workflow. Where identifiers are available, we use them to help establish consistent links between funding records and the organizations they represent.
For name-based matching, the use of an exact match and the requirement for a unique result reduce the risk of assigning an incorrect organization identifier. Where reliable matches cannot be established, a ROR ID should not be assigned.
Continuing to Improve Funder Metadata Quality
CHORUS will continue to refine its metadata ingestion and enrichment processes as Crossref practices and the use of ROR identifiers evolve. Maintaining both descriptive funder names and persistent identifiers is important to ensuring that funding information remains useful across CHORUS dashboards, reports, and related services.
By combining Crossref funding metadata with organization information available through ROR, CHORUS is working to improve the completeness, consistency, and discoverability of funding information associated with scholarly research. These enhancements help provide a more robust foundation for connecting research outputs to their funders and for supporting transparent reporting across the scholarly communications ecosystem.
