It is tempting to think of a grant as a single event: the moment an application is funded. In practice a grant is a lifecycle — a sequence of stages that begins long before the award and continues well after the last experiment, and each stage produces data that some system, somewhere, has to record. When that data is structured and carries persistent identifiers, the same fact can be entered once and read everywhere. When it is trapped in PDFs and free text, it is re-keyed at every transition, which is precisely the administrative burden CASRAI was founded to reduce. This article walks the grant lifecycle as a data object, drawing on the vocabulary of the funding and finance domain.
Pre-award: the call and the proposal
The lifecycle opens with a funder publishing an opportunity — a call for proposals (CFP) in UK and European usage, or a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) in the US idiom. The call is itself structured data: it has a sponsoring funder (identifiable by a Crossref Funder Registry ID), a programme and a scheme, eligibility rules, a budget ceiling, and deadlines. A call expressed as machine-readable metadata can be matched automatically against researcher profiles in a CRIS, rather than circulated as an email attachment.
The proposal that responds to it carries the costings, and this is where financial vocabulary needs to be precise. A budget separates direct costs — those attributable to the project — from indirect costs (overhead): the costs of supporting research that cannot be tied to one project. Different regimes calculate the split differently. The UK uses full economic costing (fEC); the US uses modified total direct cost (MTDC) as the base for its negotiated indirect-cost rate. Recording which convention a budget follows is not pedantry — it is the difference between two figures that look comparable and are not.
Award: the notice and what it sets in train
When a proposal succeeds, the funder issues an award notice: the formal communication that establishes the grant. This is the moment a great deal of metadata should crystallise. The award has a start and end date, a value, a set of reporting obligations, and — increasingly — a Crossref grant ID, a persistent identifier minted for the individual award through the Crossref grants schema. That grant ID is what lets a later publication, dataset, or piece of software cite the funding that produced it, closing the loop between money and output.
The award is also the point at which a project record proper should come into being. Where the funder or institution uses a Research Activity Identifier (RAiD), the awarded grant is one of the funding entries that the project’s RAiD record references. The grant funds the project; the project is the RAiD; the outputs cite the grant ID; and the people carry ORCID iDs and the institutions ROR IDs. Established at award, those connections travel through the rest of the lifecycle automatically.
Post-award: the part everyone underestimates
Most of a grant’s life is post-award, and most of its administrative friction lives here too. Funds are spent against budget lines, and reality rarely matches the plan exactly. A carry-forward moves unspent funds across budget periods; an underspend is what remains at a period’s end; an overspend is expenditure beyond the awarded budget. Each is a structured fact a funder report needs, and each is far easier to assemble from a system that tracked it as data than from a spreadsheet reconstructed at deadline.
The single most common post-award event is the no-cost extension (NCE): an extension of the grant period without additional funds, granted when the work needs longer than planned. An NCE changes the project’s end date — which changes when reports are due, when closeout begins, and when the project record should flip status. If the end date lives only in an approval email, every downstream system drifts out of sync. If it lives in the project’s structured metadata, the NCE updates one field and the dependent dates recompute.
Throughout the post-award phase, funders impose reporting requirements: interim and final reports, financial statements, output listings. A report assembled from structured grant data — outputs already linked by DOI to the grant ID, expenditure already categorised — is a query, not a transcription exercise.
Closeout: the stage that is mostly data hygiene
The lifecycle ends with closeout: the final administrative phase after the project’s end date. Closeout typically requires a final financial report reconciling expenditure against the award, a final outputs report, and confirmation that data-management and open-access obligations have been met. It is the stage where structured data pays off most, because closeout is almost entirely a matter of pulling together facts that should already exist as records.
A well-run closeout is where the connections established at award prove their worth. If every output carries the grant ID, the final outputs report writes itself. If the data-management plan was machine-actionable and updated through the project, confirming that the realised datasets were deposited is a check, not an investigation. If the project’s RAiD aggregates its outputs, people, and funding, the closeout report is a view over an existing graph.
Why structure the lifecycle at all
The argument for treating the grant lifecycle as structured data is the same argument that runs through all of CASRAI’s work. The same facts — funder, award value, dates, outputs, expenditure categories — are entered repeatedly into incompatible systems because no shared, identifier-anchored representation exists. A controlled vocabulary for the lifecycle’s stages and financial concepts, federated to the funder taxonomies that already exist, is the precondition for entering each fact once. The pieces are increasingly in place: the Crossref Funder Registry for funders, Crossref grant IDs for awards, RAiD for projects, ORCID and ROR for people and institutions. What is missing is the shared definitional layer that ties them to a common lifecycle model — which is exactly the role the CASRAI dictionary is built to play.
What to do now
For research offices and CRIS owners: capture the lifecycle as structured stages — call, proposal, award, post-award events, closeout — with the award’s Crossref grant ID as the spine, rather than as a folder of documents. For funders: mint grant IDs at award and require them on outputs, so that closeout reporting becomes a query. For standards work: prioritise a shared vocabulary for the financial concepts that differ by jurisdiction (fEC, MTDC, indirect-cost base) so that comparable-looking figures are genuinely comparable.
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