Research has a natural arc. A funder makes an award; the award supports a project with a team, activities and a timeline; the project produces outputs — papers, datasets, software, sometimes patents or policy contributions; and those outputs go on to have an impact. It is a single connected story. Yet in most institutions it is recorded as several disconnected ones: the grant lives in a funder’s system and a finance system, the project in a current-research-information system, and the outputs in repositories, journals and ORCID profiles — none of which reliably know about the others. The result is a fractured record in which it is surprisingly hard to answer a basic question: what did this grant actually produce? This article looks at the identifiers and standards that stitch the lifecycle back together, drawing on the research lifecycle domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The fragmentation problem
The fragmentation is not anyone’s fault; it is a consequence of these stages being managed by different organisations with different systems built at different times. But the cost is real. Funders want to demonstrate what their investment yielded and cannot easily do so. Institutions struggle to report the full output of a project. Researchers re-enter the same grant and output details into system after system. And the connective tissue — this paper came from that project, which was funded by this grant — exists only as prose in acknowledgements, if at all. The fix is to give each entity in the chain a persistent identifier and to record the links between them in a machine-readable way, so the connections survive across systems rather than living in someone’s memory.
Grant identifiers
The first link is the grant identifier: a persistent, resolvable identifier for a funding award. When a grant has its own identifier, every output it supports can reference it unambiguously, and the funder can in principle gather everything connected to the award without manual reconciliation. Persistent grant identifiers replace the fragile practice of citing awards by free-text grant numbers — which vary in format, get mistyped and cannot be resolved — with something a machine can follow. This is the foundation on which funder reporting and impact tracking depend, because without a stable handle on the award there is nothing reliable for outputs to point back to.
RAiD: identifying the project itself
The middle of the lifecycle — the project — has historically been the least well identified, and this is where RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) comes in. RAiD is an ISO-standard persistent identifier for a research project or activity. Where a grant identifier names the funding and a DOI names an output, RAiD names the project — the connecting entity that ties together the people, the institutions, the funding, and the outputs over the project’s lifetime. A RAiD record can hold these relationships in one place: who is involved (by ORCID), which organisations (by ROR), which awards fund it, and which outputs it generates. That makes the project a first-class, citable node in the graph rather than an implicit gap between funding and publication. Our explainer on what RAiD is covers how the identifier works and how it is used in practice; the essential point is that it fills the long-standing hole in the middle of the lifecycle.
Crossref grant linking
On the output side, Crossref grant linking provides the mechanism for connecting published outputs back to the funding that supported them. Funders can register their grants with Crossref, giving each a DOI, and publishers can include funding information in the metadata they deposit when registering an article. The two are then linked: a grant record can surface the outputs that acknowledge it, and an output record carries a resolvable reference to its funding. This turns the funding acknowledgement — previously unstructured prose that no machine could use — into a structured, navigable link. Combined with grant identifiers and RAiD, it completes the chain from funder to output and back again.
What a fully linked lifecycle enables
When these identifiers are in place and connected, several things become possible that were previously laborious or impossible. A funder can assemble a complete, automatically maintained picture of what an award produced — papers, datasets, software — for reporting and evaluation. An institution can report the full output of a project without manual collation. A researcher can have their outputs automatically associated with the right grant and project rather than re-keying details. And anyone can traverse the chain in either direction: from a paper to its project, funding and team, or from a grant to everything it enabled. The fractured story becomes a connected one, assembled by following identifiers rather than by hand.
Credit and consistency across the chain
A connected lifecycle also makes credit more complete. When outputs are linked to the project and people who produced them, the contributions recorded through the CRediT taxonomy become part of a larger picture — not just who did what on a single paper, but how that work fits into a funded project and a research career. The set of contribution roles is described in our overview of the CRediT roles. For all of this to function, a grant, a project and an output must be described consistently wherever they appear, so that a link made in one system is understood in another. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: the shared vocabulary that lets the whole lifecycle — funding, activity and outputs — be recorded once and connected everywhere.
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