Explainer · Plain-language

The Crossref Grant Linking System: Definition, Meaning & Examples | CASRAI

The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) is an infrastructure that lets funders register their awards as persistent, DOI-identified records and link research outputs back to the grants that supported them. By giving each grant a DOI and capturing funding metadata, the system makes it possible to trace which outputs — articles, datasets, and more — resulted from which awards. It complements Crossref's funder identification work, including the Open Funder Registry and the move toward using ROR for identifying funding organisations, and strengthens the wider persistent-identifier (PID) graph that connects the research landscape.

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The short answer

The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) enables funders to register their grants as DOI-identified records and to connect research outputs to those grants through funding metadata. Each registered award receives a grant DOI, providing a persistent, citable identifier for the funding itself, and outputs deposited with Crossref can reference the awards that supported them. This linking lets funders track the outputs of their investments and feeds the broader PID graph that ties together people, organisations, outputs, and funding. The system works alongside Crossref's funder identification — historically the Open Funder Registry — and the announced direction of using the Research Organization Registry (ROR) to identify funding organisations, improving consistency across the scholarly metadata ecosystem.

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What the Grant Linking System is

The Crossref Grant Linking System is infrastructure provided by Crossref that allows funding organisations to register their grants as metadata records, each assigned a DOI. In effect, it extends the persistent-identifier model that Crossref established for journal articles to research funding, so that an award becomes a first-class, identifiable object in the scholarly record. By registering grants in this way, funders create authoritative, machine-readable records of what they have funded, which can then be linked to and from the outputs that the funding supported.

Grant DOIs and linking outputs to grants

A central feature of the system is the grant DOI: a persistent identifier minted for each registered award. Because the grant has its own DOI, it can be cited and referenced unambiguously, just as a publication can. Research outputs registered with Crossref can include funding metadata that references the supporting awards, creating explicit links between outputs and grants. This allows the connection between an investment and its results — papers, datasets, and other outputs — to be captured in shared infrastructure rather than reconstructed manually, which is valuable for reporting and analysis.

Funder identification: Open Funder Registry and ROR

Identifying the funding organisation is essential to making funding metadata useful. Crossref historically maintained the Open Funder Registry (originally FundRef), a list of funder names and identifiers used to tag who funded a piece of work. The announced direction is to move funder identification toward the Research Organization Registry (ROR), the open, community-led registry of research organisations, which already covers funders among all research organisations. Using ROR for funders promises a single, openly licensed identifier scheme for organisations across the metadata ecosystem, reducing fragmentation between separate funder and organisation registries.

Benefits for funders and the PID graph

For funders, the system supports tracking the outputs of their awards: with grants identified by DOIs and outputs linked to them, funders can more readily see what their funding has produced, supporting evaluation, reporting, and transparency about research investment. More broadly, grant DOIs and the links they enable strengthen the persistent-identifier (PID) graph — the network of connections between researchers (via ORCID), organisations (via ROR), outputs (via DOIs), and now funding (via grant DOIs). Richer, well-connected funding metadata makes the whole research information landscape more navigable and analysable.

Key facts

At a glance

Full name: Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS)
Provider: Crossref
Core idea: Funders register grants as DOI-identified records (grant DOIs)
Function: Links research outputs to the grants that funded them via funding metadata
Funder IDs: Open Funder Registry (originally FundRef), transitioning toward ROR
Benefit: Funder output tracking and a richer persistent-identifier (PID) graph

Common misconceptions

What people often get wrong

Often heard: A grant DOI identifies a paper.

Actually: No — a grant DOI identifies the award (the funding record) itself. Outputs such as papers have their own DOIs and can be linked to the grant through funding metadata.

Often heard: The Open Funder Registry and ROR are unrelated, competing systems with no planned relationship.

Actually: No — Crossref's announced direction is to move funder identification from the Open Funder Registry toward ROR, so that funders are identified within the same open organisation registry as other research organisations.

Often heard: The Grant Linking System is only useful to Crossref.

Actually: No — it benefits funders tracking their outputs and the wider community, by enriching the PID graph that connects outputs, organisations, people, and funding.

Going deeper