CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: ai in research administration

  • UKRI Funding Finder: Building a Grant Pipeline

    The UKRI Funding Finder is UK Research and Innovation’s single search directory for live and recent funding opportunities across its seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Used on its own, it only shows what is open today. Used alongside UKRI’s “future opportunities” timeline and the Funding Service application platform, it becomes the backbone of a proper grant pipeline — replacing the old habit of checking each council’s pages separately.

    The UKRI Funding Finder is the opportunity-discovery layer of a wider UKRI digital ecosystem. It is a searchable, filterable listing — not an application system in itself — that sits at ukri.org/opportunity and feeds every live UKRI call into one interface.

    What is the UKRI Funding Finder, exactly?

    The Funding Finder is a search and filter tool, not an application form. Each listing links out to a detail page covering eligibility, assessment criteria and a “start application” button. As of July 2026, UKRI’s Funding Finder listed 124 open and recently published opportunities across its nine constituent councils, sortable by publication date, opening date or closing date.

    Opportunities that opened before 20 September 2020 are not held on the live Finder; UKRI directs users to the UK Government Web Archive for that older material. This matters for pipeline planning: the Finder is a rolling, present-and-near-past window, not a permanent archive.

    The three-tool system: Finder, timeline and Funding Service

    Most guidance treats “the UKRI Funding Finder” as one tool. In practice it is the middle layer of a three-part system, and pipeline planning depends on using all three together rather than refreshing the Finder repeatedly.

    Tool What it shows When to check it
    Future opportunities timeline Calls still in development, with expected launch months and indicative budgets, up to several months ahead Quarterly, for horizon-scanning and early case-for-support drafting
    Funding Finder Live and recently published calls with full eligibility and assessment detail Weekly, or via RSS/email alert, for active curation
    UKRI Funding Service The application, review and award-management platform behind each “start application” link Once a project lead begins drafting, through to award closure

    The future opportunities timeline is the least-used but most valuable layer for pipeline building. UKRI’s own page states it shows “the launch month for research and innovation funding opportunities coming up in the future, to enable applicants to plan ahead” — as of 1 July 2026, that timeline extended out to November 2026, and included funding information such as a £50 million total fund (maximum award £26.25 million) for the MRC’s Centre of Research Excellence round five, and a £20 million Large Grants round confirmed for November 2026.

    How to build a grant pipeline from the Funding Finder

    Building a genuine pipeline — rather than a list of deadlines — means combining discovery, filtering, capacity planning and submission tracking into one recurring process.

    1. Scan the future opportunities timeline quarterly. Flag calls matching institutional strengths months before they open, so researchers can start drafting a case for support early.
    2. Subscribe to the Funding Finder RSS feed or UKRI email updates rather than manually revisiting the page; this converts monitoring into a passive feed.
    3. Filter by council and funding type (fellowships, collaborative research and development, equipment, public engagement) to build faculty-specific sub-pipelines rather than one undifferentiated list.
    4. Check each opportunity for institutional caps. Many UKRI calls apply demand management limits on how many applications one organisation may submit, which requires an internal sifting or peer-review step before submission.
    5. Set up Funding Service administrator accounts and notification groups so the research office is automatically alerted when a project lead starts a draft, and can route notifications to finance or costing teams.

    This sequencing matters because the Funding Service does not carry personal account data forward from UKRI’s legacy Je-S (Joint Electronic Submissions) system — UKRI states explicitly that “personal account information from the Joint Electronic Submissions (Je-S) system will not be transferred to the Funding Service.” Pipelines built on old Je-S habits, such as saved searches or stored contact lists, do not migrate automatically and must be rebuilt inside the new service.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is the UKRI Funding Service?

    The UKRI Funding Service is UKRI’s digital platform for applying to and managing research and innovation funding. It replaced the legacy Je-S system, hosting the online application form, team-member roles, co-editing, review responses and award management for opportunities that display a “start application” link from the Funding Finder.

    Who is eligible for UKRI funding?

    Eligibility is set per opportunity, not centrally. Each Funding Finder listing states which organisations, career stages and roles (project lead, fellow, co-investigator) qualify for that specific council and scheme; applicants should check the “who is eligible” section of the individual call rather than assume blanket eligibility across UKRI.

    What is the success rate of UKRI funding?

    UKRI does not publish one blended success rate on the Funding Finder itself. Individual research councils report scheme-level outcomes in their own annual reports, and rates vary widely by call type — oversubscribed responsive-mode rounds are typically far more competitive than invite-only or directed opportunities, so pipeline planning should treat success rate as scheme-specific, not UKRI-wide.

    Is UKRI funded by the government?

    Yes. UKRI is a non-departmental public body that receives its funding as grant-in-aid from the UK government, primarily through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s science and innovation budget, which it then allocates across its nine councils.

    What this means for research offices

    Institutions that treat the Funding Finder as a static search page will always be reacting to deadlines. Institutions that layer the future opportunities timeline, RSS alerts, council-specific filters and Funding Service administrator accounts into a single recurring research administration workflow convert the same public data into genuine lead time — the single biggest lever research administrators have for improving application quality within UKRI’s demand-managed, capped-application environment.

    The practical shift is procedural, not technical: no new software is required, only a scheduled habit of checking the timeline before the Finder, and the Finder before the Funding Service. As UKRI continues migrating remaining legacy Je-S workflows onto the Funding Service, research offices that have already built this three-layer habit will adapt fastest, because their pipeline never depended on the old system in the first place.

  • UKRI Gateway to Research: A Reporting Guide

    UKRI’s Gateway to Research (GtR) is the free, open database of research and innovation projects funded by UK Research and Innovation since 2006, covering roughly 170,000 awards. Research administrators use it to track funded projects, benchmark peer institutions and pull evidence for institutional and REF-style reporting, without needing a login or a data-sharing agreement.

    Gateway to Research is UKRI’s public search and analysis portal for administrative data on publicly funded UK research and innovation, refreshed quarterly from UKRI’s central Databank. It is distinct from UKRI’s funding finder, which lists open funding calls rather than completed or active awards — a distinction covered in detail below.

    What is UKRI’s Gateway to Research?

    Gateway to Research (GtR) is the open portal UKRI built to make its funding data visible and searchable by the public. It draws on administrative records held in UKRI’s Databank, sourced from the Innovation Funding Service, the UKRI Funding Service, the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, off-system project records, and an annual outcomes collection run through a service provided by Elsevier.

    UKRI’s own guidance confirms GtR covers 170,000 funded projects with start dates on or after 1 January 2006, with UKRI-funded studentship information available from 1 February 2015 onwards. The site is built on open source, open standards and an Open Government Licence, so both the interface and the underlying code are free to reuse.

    Coverage spans the seven research councils — AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC and STFC — plus Innovate UK and a growing number of UKRI-managed delivery programmes. Research England funding is a notable exception: because most of its money is allocated as a block grant rather than project-by-project, it is not published in GtR.

    How do you search Gateway to Research for funded projects?

    GtR supports a keyword search from its homepage, refined by side-panel facets rather than a single advanced-search form. This makes it fast to move from a broad topic to a specific award once you know which filters to combine.

    • Use double quotes for an exact phrase, for example “open access monitoring”.
    • Combine terms with AND, OR and NOT (uppercase) to broaden or narrow results.
    • Filter by funder (e.g. EPSRC, MRC), project category, start year, region and lead research organisation.
    • Open a project record to see the abstract, funded value, duration, collaborating organisations, named investigators and, where available, ORCID iDs and linked publications.

    Each project page also links to a “related projects” tab, which is essential when an award has been transferred between organisations, since GtR issues a new reference suffix (/2, /3, and so on) for each transfer rather than overwriting the original record.

    Gateway to Research vs the UKRI funding finder: which tool do you need?

    These two UKRI tools are frequently confused because both sit under ukri.org and gtr.ukri.org, but they answer opposite questions. GtR looks backwards at what has already been funded; the funding finder looks forwards at what is currently open for application.

    Feature Gateway to Research (GtR) UKRI funding finder
    Purpose Search historical and active funded projects Search currently open funding opportunities
    URL gtr.ukri.org ukri.org/opportunity
    Data scope ~170,000 awards from 1 Jan 2006 onwards Live calls only, replaced as deadlines close
    Update frequency Quarterly (second week of Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct) Continuous, as calls open and close
    Typical user Research administrators, analysts, developers Applicants seeking funding

    If your task is to benchmark what a peer institution has already won, GtR is the correct source. If the task is to identify a call to apply to, the funding finder — not GtR — is the tool you need.

    Using GtR data for institutional benchmarking and reporting

    Research offices use GtR as a free alternative to commercial funding-intelligence platforms for lightweight benchmarking. Filtering by lead research organisation and funder produces a portfolio view of a competitor institution’s award count, funded value and subject spread without a subscription.

    Two structural details matter for reporting accuracy. First, funded value reflects commitment, not spend — it is the amount UKRI approved at award stage, drawn down over the project’s life, so it should not be equated with cash disbursed in a given reporting year. Second, since October 2025 all awards issued via the UKRI Funding Service carry a “UKRI” prefix in their award identifier (for example, UKRI127, replacing the previous numeric-only format), which affects how administrators cross-reference internal grant codes against GtR records.

    The People and Publications tabs also make GtR useful for tracking named investigators across institutions and linking outputs to ORCID iDs, supporting the kind of contributor-and-output reporting that research administration offices are increasingly asked to produce for funders and league-table submissions.

    Data limitations every research administrator should know

    UKRI’s own data guide, last substantively updated for the April 2026 refresh, sets out limitations that should sit alongside any figure pulled from GtR:

    • Exclusions: 3.6% of projects are excluded from publication, either flagged “Do Not Publish” or awaiting funder identification.
    • Duplicate organisations and people: UKRI lacks unique identifiers across all its source systems, so the same institution or researcher can appear under multiple names — any headcount or organisation count is likely an overestimate.
    • Regional attribution: project region is based on the lead applicant’s postcode, not where the research is actually carried out, which tends to overrepresent administrative hubs such as London, Oxford and Cambridge.
    • Classification inconsistency: UKRI advises against using its project categories for trend analysis across funders, as classification rules are not applied consistently.

    Developers can also query GtR programmatically through two public APIs, though UKRI describes the API as currently unsupported and recommends building request delays and cache-busting parameters into any automated pipeline that pages through results.

    Frequently asked questions

    Is UKRI’s Gateway to Research free to use?

    Yes. GtR is open and free for all users, built on open source, open standards and an Open Government Licence. Both the website and its underlying data and code can be reused by third parties, including through UKRI’s public API, without a subscription or login.

    How often is Gateway to Research data updated?

    GtR refreshes on a quarterly cycle, scheduled for the second week of January, April, July and October. Each release pulls the latest snapshot from UKRI’s central Databank, so figures can lag real-time award decisions by up to three months.

    What is the difference between Gateway to Research and the UKRI funding finder?

    GtR is a retrospective database of funded and active projects since 2006; the funding finder is a live listing of open calls. Use GtR to see what has been awarded, and the funding finder to find opportunities to apply for.

    Can I access Gateway to Research data through an API?

    Yes. UKRI provides two public APIs for programmatic access, though they are officially unsupported. UKRI recommends paging through results with built-in delays and using cache-busting query parameters to avoid stale error responses.

    As UKRI continues to consolidate its systems — including folding new studentship data into GtR from mid-2026 — the dataset is likely to become more consistent, though the underlying caution around duplicate organisation names and commitment-versus-spend figures will remain relevant for any institution using GtR as an evidence source in formal reporting.

  • UKRI Stipend 2026/27: Research Budget Guide for Institutions

    UKRI’s confirmed minimum PhD stipend for the 2026/27 academic year is £21,805, a 4.9% increase on the 2025/26 rate of £20,780, effective from 1 October 2026. The minimum tuition fee UKRI pays providers rises to £5,238, and students with London weighting receive £23,805. Research offices should lock these figures into studentship budgets, award letters and multi-year cost models now, before the autumn intake.

    UKRI stipend rates 2026/27 refers to the minimum annual maintenance payment that UK Research and Innovation requires providers to pay full-time doctoral students funded through its training grants, set out in the Support for UKRI-funded students guidance.

    Contents

    What is the UKRI stipend rate for 2026/27?

    UKRI has set the minimum stipend for full-time, UKRI-funded doctoral students at £21,805 for the 2026/27 academic year, up from £20,780 in 2025/26. The increase, confirmed on UKRI’s Support for UKRI-funded students page (last updated 7 May 2026), takes effect from 1 October 2026 and applies across all seven research councils.

    The rate is a floor, not a cap. Grant holders may pay more within their award budget, and award letters should be checked for any enhanced or discipline-specific stipend that supersedes the UKRI minimum.

    How does the 2026/27 rate compare to previous years?

    The 4.9% uplift for 2026/27 follows an 8% rise the previous year — described by UKRI as the largest real-terms stipend increase for its funded students since 2003. Viewed over a decade, the minimum stipend has grown by roughly 50%, while the minimum fee level has grown more slowly.

    Academic year Minimum stipend (£) Fee level (£)
    2017 to 2018 14,553 4,195
    2019 to 2020 15,009 4,327
    2021 to 2022 15,609 4,500
    2023 to 2024 18,622 4,712
    2024 to 2025 19,237 4,786
    2025 to 2026 20,780 5,006
    2026 to 2027 21,805 5,238

    Source: UKRI, Guidance for training grant holders. Some universities are already publishing forward guidance for the year after next — the University of Glasgow’s studentship funding pages currently cite an indicative 2027/28 minimum stipend of £22,437, though institutions should treat any figure beyond 2026/27 as provisional until UKRI confirms it.

    What else changes: fees, London weighting and exceptions

    Three figures matter for a complete 2026/27 studentship cost model, and they do not move in lockstep. The minimum fee UKRI contributes rises 4.6% to £5,238; the London-weighted stipend rises to £23,805; and one discipline carries a materially different floor.

    • Minimum fee (2026/27): £5,238, drawn by the provider from the UKRI grant and capped at the home fee rate — international students may need to cover any shortfall themselves.
    • London weighting: £23,805, a £2,000 uplift on the standard minimum. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council does not apply this weighting, though EPSRC grant holders may still offer higher stipends within their own budget regardless of location.
    • BBSRC veterinary exception: students on a recognised veterinary degree pathway funded through a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council training grant have a separate, substantially higher minimum stipend of £30,488 for 2026/27 — more than £8,600 above the standard floor.

    Research Training Support Grant (RTSG) allocations, used for conference travel, fieldwork and equipment, are set separately by each council and are not part of the stipend calculation, but should be modelled alongside it for full studentship cost visibility.

    How should research offices budget for this?

    A UKRI studentship typically runs three to four years, so a single rate change touches multiple cohorts and award letters at once. Research offices should treat the 2026/27 uplift as a trigger to re-check every open and pending award, not just new intakes.

    • Update stipend lines in all award letters issued for students starting from 1 October 2026, including any offers made before the rate was confirmed.
    • Re-model multi-year studentship budgets for students who started in 2024/25 or 2025/26, since their stipend typically escalates to the current minimum in each subsequent year of study, not just at entry.
    • Pro-rate correctly for part-time students — UKRI’s minimum applies to full-time study, with part-time stipends calculated pro rata to study intensity.
    • Check discipline-specific exceptions before finalising BBSRC veterinary-pathway budgets against the standard minimum, as the two floors differ by over £8,600.
    • Confirm which council’s terms apply, since terms and conditions for training grants and the statement of expectations for doctoral training set monitoring, leave and reporting obligations that sit alongside the stipend figure itself.

    Award management and reporting for these grants runs through UKRI’s Funding Service (commonly referred to as TFS), which providers use to submit studentship data and manage award terms. Keeping Studentship Data System records current is a condition of training grant compliance, separate from but linked to the stipend obligation.

    Institutional research administration teams should also budget for statutory leave entitlements that continue to accrue stipend payments — including at least 30 days’ annual leave and up to 28 weeks of medical leave in a rolling 12-month period — since these do not reduce or pause the stipend commitment.

    Common questions from research administrators

    What is the new stipend rate for UKRI?

    UKRI’s new minimum stipend for 2026/27 is £21,805, a 4.9% rise on the £20,780 rate paid in 2025/26. It applies to full-time students on UKRI training grants from 1 October 2026 across all seven research councils.

    How much will the UKRI 2026/27 fees be?

    The minimum fee UKRI contributes towards tuition for 2026/27 is £5,238, up from £5,006 in 2025/26. This is drawn by the provider from the training grant and capped at the home fee rate, regardless of a student’s residency status.

    How much is the PhD stipend in London for 2026/27?

    Students with London weighting receive a minimum stipend of £23,805 for 2026/27 — £2,000 above the standard rate. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council does not apply this weighting to its funded students.

    Is the PhD stipend going up each year?

    Yes. UKRI’s minimum stipend has risen every year since 2017/18, including an 8% increase for 2025/26 and a further 4.9% for 2026/27, reflecting sustained pressure to keep doctoral funding aligned with the cost of living.

    Implications for institutional planning

    The 2026/27 uplift is confirmed, not provisional, which gives research offices a firm number to plan against for the coming intake. The harder planning problem is the multi-year tail: students who started under earlier, lower rates will typically see their stipend rise to the current minimum each October, which compounds across a three- or four-year training grant and can leave under-budgeted awards short by the final year.

    Institutions that model studentship costs on entry-year rates alone risk understating total commitment. Building an escalating-rate assumption into every new studentship budget — rather than treating the entry-year figure as fixed — is the single most consequential adjustment research offices can make in response to this cycle of increases.

  • ORCID Statistics 2026: Adoption, Coverage Gaps

    ORCID’s own registry statistics show 10.5 million active users and over 1,500 organisational members across 69 countries at the end of 2025, up from 14.7 million total live accounts recorded in August 2022 — a shift in reporting method, not a decline. The remaining gap sits in disciplinary coverage (arts and humanities workflows only gained dedicated support in 2025) and in the difference between countries with paying member organisations and the much larger set of countries where individual researchers self-register for free.

    ORCID is a nonproprietary, persistent digital identifier — a 16-digit alphanumeric code — that lets a researcher disambiguate their scholarly identity and link it, via their own registry record, to affiliations, grants, peer review activity and publications. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, a complementary standard now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022; ORCID and CRediT are frequently implemented together in manuscript and grant systems but are governed by separate organisations.

    What do ORCID’s 2026 registry statistics show?

    ORCID’s most recent published figures come from its 2025 Year in Review, released on 18 December 2025: 10.5 million active users worldwide and more than 1,500 organisational members spread across 69 countries. The same review reports 125 new organisations joining in 2025 and two new consortia launched in Africa, alongside a 60% increase in the number of member organisations actively pushing data — affiliations, grants, peer review credits — into researcher records during the 2022–2025 strategic period.

    At the time of writing, ORCID’s own live statistics dashboard carries a data-lag notice, stating that figures are current only through 14 May. That is a useful reminder for anyone citing “ORCID statistics”: the real-time counter is not authoritative for a current snapshot, and analysts should cross-check it against ORCID’s periodic Annual Report and Year in Review publications rather than quoting the live number in isolation.

    Regionally, the largest documented national implementation remains the ORCID US Community, coordinated by Lyrasis. Its December 2025 statistics report that member organisations had collectively added 2,296,427 works to ORCID records — a single-country figure that illustrates how much of the registry’s content growth is now driven by institutional auto-update pipelines rather than manual entry by individual researchers.

    How has ORCID adoption grown since the registry launched?

    ORCID launched its registry service on 16 October 2012. Growth since then has followed a clear step pattern of publicly announced milestones rather than a smooth curve, reflecting periods when major publishers and funders made ORCID mandatory in submission workflows.

    Milestone Date Reported figure Source
    Registry launches 16 Oct 2012 Registry opens for iD creation ORCID
    One-millionth iD 15 Nov 2014 1,000,000 registrations ORCID announcement
    Ten-millionth iD 20 Nov 2020 10,000,000 registrations ORCID announcement
    Live-account snapshot 2 Aug 2022 14,727,479 live accounts ORCID Statistics
    Active-user snapshot 31 Dec 2025 10.5 million active users; 1,500+ members in 69 countries ORCID 2025 Year in Review

    The apparent drop between the 2022 and 2025 rows is not a decline in registrations. ORCID changed the metric it leads with: “live accounts” counts every account ever created and not since deactivated, while “active users” measures researchers who have logged in, updated a record, or had a record updated for them within the review period. Cumulative registrations have continued to climb every year since 2012; the active-user figure is a narrower, arguably more meaningful, engagement measure.

    Where are the coverage gaps by discipline and region?

    Two structural gaps stand out in ORCID’s own reporting, and neither shows up if you only quote the headline registration count.

    • Organisational versus individual coverage: ORCID reports 69 countries with formal, fee-paying member organisations, but individual researchers anywhere in the world can create a free iD without any institutional membership. The 69-country figure measures institutional buy-in, not global reach — conflating the two overstates how embedded ORCID is in some regions’ formal research infrastructure.
    • Disciplinary coverage: ORCID’s 2025 Year in Review confirms the platform only introduced a dedicated work-types taxonomy for arts and humanities scholars in 2025, thirteen years after launch. Earlier record structures were built around STEM and biomedical publication patterns (journal articles, datasets, grants), which historically under-served disciplines whose outputs include exhibitions, compositions, translations and other non-journal formats.

    ORCID’s 2025 expansion into two new African consortia is a direct, attributed signal that the organisation itself identifies regional under-representation as a strategic gap to close, rather than a solved problem. Institutions auditing their own ORCID uptake should treat “percentage of active researchers with a linked iD” and “percentage of records receiving auto-updates” as two separate KPIs — the first measures registration, the second measures whether the identifier is actually doing useful work.

    Frequently asked questions about ORCID statistics

    What does ORCID stand for?

    ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It is both the name of the identifier — a free, 16-digit code — and the non-profit organisation, ORCID Inc., that maintains the registry. The system was created to resolve author name ambiguity across scholarly publishing.

    Should researchers put their ORCID iD on a CV?

    Yes. Adding an ORCID iD to a CV, grant application or publication list gives reviewers a single, disambiguated link to a researcher’s full record of affiliations, grants and publications, reducing the manual effort of re-entering the same information across different funder and publisher systems.

    Can I look up someone else’s ORCID iD?

    Yes, provided the record owner has set the relevant fields to public visibility. ORCID’s public API and website allow anyone to search the registry by name or affiliation; member-API credentials are only required for programmatic, higher-volume lookups, not for a single manual search.

    Is ORCID the same as LinkedIn?

    No. ORCID is a non-profit, standards-based persistent identifier registry focused on disambiguating scholarly contributions, not a commercial social network. LinkedIn is a for-profit professional networking platform; the two serve different purposes and are not interoperable identifier systems.

    What the data means for institutions, publishers and funders

    The 2025 figures make one thing explicit: raw registration totals are no longer the most useful adoption metric. Institutions and publishers assessing their own ORCID maturity should look at ORCID’s member auto-update volume — the 60% rise in member organisations pushing data into records over 2022–2025 — as the leading indicator, because it reflects integration depth rather than a one-off sign-up.

    For research administrators and funders, the practical implication is to require ORCID iDs at the point of grant submission or manuscript intake and then connect institutional systems to ORCID’s auto-update APIs, rather than treating iD collection as a box-ticking exercise. ORCID’s own strategic direction supports this: its incoming plan, “ORCID 2030: Empowering the Future of Research,” due to launch in early 2026, is expected to keep prioritising trust, integration depth and global participation over headline registration counts.

    Coverage gaps by discipline and region are narrowing but remain real, and they are best tracked using ORCID’s own Annual Report and Year in Review publications rather than the live statistics counter, which — as of this analysis — was not returning a current total.

  • ORCID Research Assessment: Five National Models

    ORCID research identification — linking a researcher’s persistent iD to the outputs they submit for evaluation — is no longer a REF-only story. Australia’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), Italy’s Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca (VQR), and United States federal disclosure rules under NSPM-33 all use the same underlying identifier to cut duplicate reporting and improve attribution accuracy.

    ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-profit, community-governed registry that issues a free, persistent researcher unique identifier, used to disambiguate individuals and link them reliably to their scholarly outputs across institutions, funders and countries.

    This is a systems-level comparison, not a REF compliance checklist. It sets out what “orcid research” actually means for national assessment infrastructure, and what research administrators in other jurisdictions can learn from five different implementation models.

    What is ORCID research identification, and why does it matter for assessment?

    ORCID assigns each individual a 16-digit iD that stays constant across name changes, institutional moves and career stages. That persistence is what makes it useful for assessment exercises: a system built on ORCID iDs can match a researcher to their outputs automatically, instead of relying on manually typed names that are easily duplicated, misspelled or confused with a namesake.

    For a searcher asking what is ORCID iD in research: it is the identifier layer that sits underneath a growing number of national reporting workflows, connecting a researcher’s ORCID record to journal articles, datasets, grants and peer reviews via APIs held by publishers, funders and institutional repositories.

    Two problems drive adoption in assessment contexts:

    • Reporting burden. Researchers and administrators re-key the same publication lists into multiple systems — institutional repository, funder portal, national assessment platform — for every reporting cycle.
    • Attribution accuracy. Common surnames, transliteration variants and institutional affiliation changes make name-only matching unreliable at national scale.

    How do national research assessment systems use ORCID?

    Five jurisdictions illustrate distinct implementation models, ranging from “recommended” to a designated statutory disclosure identifier.

    Country / system Assessment exercise Steward body ORCID status Mechanism
    United Kingdom REF 2029 Research England / UKRI Recommended, not mandatory Supports the open-access output workflow ahead of the REF 2029 policy taking effect 1 January 2026
    Australia ERA, via ARC Research Management System Australian Research Council (ARC) Encouraged, auto-population enabled Researchers link an ORCID record so RMS profiles auto-import their publication list
    Italy VQR 2020–2024 ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes) Required for participating researchers ORCID iD registration and linkage to submitted outputs, feeding from IRIS institutional repositories
    United States Federal disclosure under NSPM-33 (no single national exercise) OSTP / NSF / NIH Designated digital persistent identifier (DPI) SciENcv biosketch and current-and-pending-support forms require a linked ORCID account
    Finland National Research Information Hub / research.fi CSC – IT Center for Science Recommended national researcher identifier ORCID login via Suomi.fi e-identification links researcher profiles to outputs nationally

    The common pattern is “enter once, reuse often”: a researcher curates one ORCID record, and every downstream system — grant portal, institutional repository, national assessment platform — draws from that single source rather than requesting a fresh manual submission.

    What measurable benefits has ORCID delivered so far?

    Attributed, publicly reported figures show the effect at scale in at least two of the five systems above, plus the underlying registry itself.

    • The Australian Research Council reports that its 2018 ORCID integration into the Research Management System saw more than 1.4 million research outputs uploaded to researcher profiles, with roughly 940,800 of them imported automatically via ORCID across more than 14,000 researchers.
    • ANVUR’s policy for the Italian VQR 2020–2024 requires participating researchers to register an ORCID iD and link it to submitted publications, explicitly to reduce duplicate reporting between institutional IRIS repositories and the national exercise.
    • Under NSPM-33, US federal agencies including NSF and NIH require biosketch and current-and-pending-support disclosures through SciENcv, which requires a linked ORCID account — standardising researcher disclosure across agencies that previously used incompatible CV formats.
    • The ORCID registry itself had issued more than 21 million iDs and counted over 1,400 member organisations — publishers, funders, universities and consortia — by 2024, giving national systems a large, interoperable base to build on.
    • Research England’s REF 2029 open-access policy, which takes effect for outputs published from 1 January 2026, treats ORCID registration as good practice supporting output management, though it stops short of a mandatory requirement.

    The comparison is instructive: jurisdictions that moved from “encouraged” (Australia, Finland, REF) to “required or designated” (Italy, US federal agencies) report the clearest reduction in duplicate manual entry, because auto-population only works reliably once linkage is near-universal across the researcher population being assessed.

    Frequently asked questions

    What does ORCID mean in research?

    ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. In research, it is a persistent, free identifier that distinguishes one researcher from another with a similar or identical name, and links that person reliably to their publications, datasets, grants and peer reviews across institutions and countries.

    Is ORCID free to use?

    Yes. Individual ORCID registration and record use are free and always will be under ORCID’s governing principles. Institutional and publisher ORCID membership — which funds the non-profit registry and enables API-level integrations such as auto-population — is a paid tier, but it carries no cost for the individual researcher.

    Is ORCID trustworthy?

    ORCID operates as a non-profit registry governed by its member organisations, with published transparency and open-data principles. Researchers control what appears on their own record and who can see it, which is why national assessment bodies including ANVUR and the ARC treat it as a reliable base layer rather than a proprietary vendor system.

    How to get ORCID research?

    Register at orcid.org/register, a process that takes under a minute and requires only a name and email address. Once registered, a researcher connects the iD to institutional, funder and publisher systems so outputs and affiliations populate the record automatically for future assessment cycles.

    What should research administrators do next?

    The REF 2029 experience is one data point, not the template. Systems that made ORCID linkage a condition of participation — Italy’s VQR, US federal SciENcv disclosure — report faster convergence on clean, deduplicated researcher-output data than systems where linkage remains optional.

    For institutions operating across multiple national or funder reporting regimes, three implications follow:

    • Treat ORCID linkage as reporting infrastructure, not a one-off registration task — it must be maintained across staff transitions and repository migrations to keep auto-population accurate.
    • Where a national exercise (or a funder mandate) has moved from “recommended” to “required,” expect the sharpest drop in manual re-keying, based on the Australian and Italian evidence above.
    • Pair identifier infrastructure with contribution-level attribution standards: ORCID answers “who,” while frameworks such as the CRediT contributor role taxonomy answer “did what.” CASRAI originated CRediT in 2014; it is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Institutions building assessment pipelines benefit from aligning both layers rather than treating identifier and attribution separately — see the CASRAI overview of CRediT contributor roles and the wider research administration resources for related standards.

    National research assessment is converging on a shared identifier layer even where the assessment models themselves differ sharply — peer review in Italy, metrics-assisted auto-population in Australia, statutory disclosure in the United States. The REF is one implementation among several, not the reference design.

  • Does bioRxiv Count as a Publication? A Guide for Tenure and Promotion Committees

    Does bioRxiv count as a publication? No — not on its own. A bioRxiv preprint is a citable, DOI-registered scientific manuscript that has not been through peer review, and bioRxiv’s own FAQ states plainly that the server “is not a journal so it has no Impact Factor.” Tenure and promotion (P&T) committees should treat it as a genuine, citable research output — evidence of productivity, priority, and open-science practice — but list and weigh it separately from peer-reviewed publications.

    A preprint is a complete scientific manuscript that authors make publicly available before, or independently of, certification by journal peer review.

    What Is a bioRxiv Preprint?

    bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences, operated by the non-profit openRxiv. Manuscripts are screened for plagiarism and inappropriate content but are posted online within roughly 72 hours, without editorial peer review, copyediting, or typesetting.

    Every posted manuscript receives a Crossref-registered DOI, which is what makes it citable and part of the permanent scientific record. bioRxiv preprints are indexed by Google Scholar, Crossref, Europe PMC, Semantic Scholar, and the Preprint Citation Index connected to the Web of Science; preprints reporting NIH-funded research are also indexed in PubMed.

    Because it distributes preprints rather than certified, edited articles, bioRxiv does not carry an ISSN — the identifier reserved for ongoing serial (journal) publications. There is no equivalent of a “bioRxiv issue” or “bioRxiv volume”; each preprint stands alone under its own DOI, which is the correct locator to use in citations, CVs, and grant applications.

    Does bioRxiv Count as a Formal Publication?

    No. bioRxiv’s FAQ is direct on this point: preprints “have not been finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.” A preprint is a manuscript in circulation, not a certified publication.

    This has two immediate, practical consequences for committees:

    • No journal metrics apply. bioRxiv has no Impact Factor because it is not a journal — the metric does not exist for it, and any “bioRxiv impact factor” figure circulating online is not authoritative.
    • No peer-review certification exists unless a journal or independent review service has posted its reviews alongside the preprint via bioRxiv’s public review dashboard, which some — but not most — preprints carry.

    The distinction matters most in biomedical fields, where the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that journals not treat prior posting on a recognised preprint server as prior publication that would bar later submission — preprints and journal articles are understood as different stages of the same research, not competing outputs.

    Criterion bioRxiv preprint Peer-reviewed journal article
    Peer review None (screening only) Completed by journal referees
    Persistent identifier DOI (Crossref) DOI (Crossref)
    ISSN Not applicable Carried by the journal
    Impact Factor None — not a journal May apply, per journal
    Citable and indexed Yes — Google Scholar, Crossref, Europe PMC Yes, plus journal-specific indexes
    Counts as REF output (UK) Not an eligible output type alone Yes, as version of record or AAM

    How Should Research Offices and P&T Committees Weigh Preprints?

    Institutional guidance is converging on a middle position: preprints are legitimate, citable evidence of research activity, but they are not substitutes for peer-reviewed publication in a promotion dossier. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recommends that institutions “value the full range of research outputs” and stop leaning on journal-level metrics as a proxy for quality — a principle that supports counting preprints as evidence of output, provided their unreviewed status is disclosed, not concealed.

    Funder policy reinforces this. The US National Institutes of Health states that it “encourages investigators to use interim research products, such as preprints, to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work,” and explicitly permits citing preprints in grant applications and progress reports.

    In the UK, the position is narrower for one specific purpose: the Research Excellence Framework (REF) requires submitted outputs to be the version of record or the author’s accepted manuscript of a peer-reviewed work. A bioRxiv preprint is not, by itself, an eligible REF output type — it can evidence timeliness and priority in a narrative CV, but the REF-returnable output remains the eventual peer-reviewed article.

    These decisions typically sit with the research administration office coordinating the promotion dossier, working alongside the candidate and department. Research offices advising P&T committees should:

    1. Confirm whether the department’s or institution’s promotion policy names preprints explicitly, rather than assuming silence means exclusion.
    2. Ask candidates to separate preprints from peer-reviewed publications on the CV, never blend the two lists.
    3. Treat preprint citation counts and altmetrics as supplementary evidence of impact, not a replacement for peer-review certification.
    4. Check REF, funder, and journal eligibility rules before assuming a preprint alone satisfies an output requirement.

    How to Cite and List bioRxiv Preprints

    bioRxiv’s own citation guidance is the authoritative format: cite the preprint using its DOI, in the style Author AN, Author BT. Year. Title. bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/xxxxxx. If a specific version needs citing, add the version-specific URL alongside the DOI, since revisions post under the same DOI but remain individually accessible in the article’s version history.

    On a CV or narrative CV, best practice is to follow the same disclosure standards used for other authorship and contribution records:

    • Create a clearly labelled “Preprints” or “Working Papers” heading, separate from “Peer-Reviewed Publications.”
    • Include the DOI for every entry, since bioRxiv preprints are permanently archived (via Portico) and citable indefinitely, even if later withdrawn.
    • Note the eventual journal placement once available — bioRxiv automatically links a preprint to its published version within about two weeks of journal publication.
    • In funding applications, cite preprints exactly as NIH and comparable funders permit: as interim research products, with the DOI as the locator.

    bioRxiv preprints cannot be withdrawn from the record once posted; authors may only append a formal withdrawal statement, and the original manuscript stays accessible. This permanence is precisely why the DOI, not the manuscript title alone, is the correct and durable citation anchor for any P&T dossier.

    Preprint FAQs for Promotion Committees

    Is bioRxiv considered published?

    No. bioRxiv preprints are unpublished manuscripts distributed before or independent of journal peer review. They carry a DOI and are part of the citable scientific record, but bioRxiv itself states they have not been “accepted or endorsed” by the scientific community through peer review.

    Can you cite a bioRxiv paper?

    Yes. Every bioRxiv preprint receives a Crossref DOI, making it citable in manuscripts, CVs, and grant applications. The NIH explicitly permits citing preprints in funding applications as interim research products, and most journals now accept prior preprint posting.

    What qualifies as a publication?

    A formal publication is a manuscript that has completed editorial peer review and been accepted, edited, and released by a journal or publisher, typically carrying an ISSN (journal) and article DOI. A preprint, lacking peer review, does not meet this threshold on its own.

    Is bioRxiv a journal?

    No. bioRxiv is a preprint archive and distribution service operated by the non-profit openRxiv, not a journal. It has no editorial board issuing acceptance decisions and, per its own FAQ, “no Impact Factor” because that metric applies only to journals.

    For promotion committees, the practical takeaway is definitional discipline: a bioRxiv preprint is real, citable, DOI-anchored research evidence — but it is not a peer-reviewed publication, has no Impact Factor or ISSN, and should be evaluated on its own terms, alongside institutional, funder, and (in the UK) REF-specific rules, rather than folded silently into a publication list.

  • Data Sharing Policy: A Research Office Template

    A data sharing policy is the institution-wide governance document that sets expectations for how researchers plan, deposit, and share research data — distinct from a data sharing agreement, which is the specific legal contract governing one data transfer. Research offices write policies to translate funder FAIR data mandates, such as the NIH’s 2023 Data Management and Sharing Policy, into consistent local practice.

    A data sharing policy is an institutional statement of principle and requirement: it tells every researcher, department, and grant applicant what the organisation expects of them before, during, and after a funded project, regardless of discipline or funder. It is not a substitute for a project-level data management plan (DMP), and it is not the same document as a data sharing agreement — the confusion between the two is the single most common drafting mistake research offices make.

    What is an institutional data sharing policy?

    An institutional data sharing policy is a governance document, usually owned jointly by the research office, library, and IT services, that sets baseline rules for how the organisation’s researchers manage and share the data underlying their published outputs. It applies across all disciplines and funders, rather than to a single grant.

    Published examples illustrate the range: the Office for National Statistics operates a data sharing policy governing record-level personal information, while Cancer Research UK’s data sharing and management policy sets FAIR-aligned requirements as a condition of every grant it awards. Both share a common shape — purpose, scope, principles, requirements, and named responsibilities — even though one governs a funder’s grant conditions and the other governs a public body’s statistical data.

    For a research office, the policy is the document that makes funder requirements operational at institutional scale: instead of each principal investigator interpreting a funder’s data mandate independently, the institution issues one interpretation, one set of approved repositories, and one escalation route for exceptions.

    Why research offices need a data sharing policy now

    Research offices need a written policy because funders increasingly make data sharing a condition of funding, not a recommendation, and institutions without a policy leave researchers to interpret those conditions inconsistently — which creates compliance risk at renewal, audit, and publication stages.

    The mandate landscape has hardened over the past decade:

    • NIH’s 2023 Data Management and Sharing Policy took effect on 25 January 2023 and requires a data management and sharing plan for essentially all NIH-funded research, reviewed alongside the science.
    • UKRI is a signatory to the 2016 Concordat on Open Research Data, which commits funded institutions to making research data openly available with as few restrictions as possible.
    • Horizon Europe’s Model Grant Agreement requires a FAIR-aligned data management plan for participating projects, applying the “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” principle carried over from Horizon 2020.
    • ICMJE’s data sharing statement requirement has applied to clinical trials that began enrolling participants on or after 1 January 2019, requiring a data availability statement as a condition of publication in ICMJE-following journals.

    Each of these mandates is written at the funder level. The institutional policy is what converts them into a single, consistent set of expectations that a research office can actually train staff on and audit against.

    Data sharing policy vs data sharing agreement

    A data sharing policy and a data sharing agreement solve different problems: the policy is a standing, institution-wide statement of expectations, while the agreement is a one-off legal contract governing a specific transfer of specific data between specific parties. Research offices need both, but they are drafted, owned, and reviewed differently.

    Aspect Institutional data sharing policy Data sharing agreement
    Scope All researchers, all funded projects, ongoing One dataset, one recipient, one purpose
    Trigger Institutional governance cycle A specific request or collaboration
    Legal status Internal policy; not itself a contract Binding contract, often referencing UK GDPR
    Typical owner Research office, library, IT, ethics committee Data protection officer, legal counsel
    Reviewed by Institution, periodically Both parties, per transfer

    A well-written policy should explicitly state this distinction and point researchers to the correct process for each: the policy for general expectations and deposit requirements, the agreement (or a data protection impact assessment) for any transfer involving personal, sensitive, or third-party data governed by UK GDPR.

    Template structure: what to include

    A usable institutional data sharing policy needs roughly eight components, moving from purpose through to enforcement, so that researchers and reviewers can find any given requirement in under a minute.

    1. Preamble and purpose — why the institution requires data sharing and its relationship to the FAIR principles, first published in Scientific Data in 2016.
    2. Scope — which staff, students, and data (all disciplines, all funders, or funder-specific) the policy covers.
    3. Definitions — research data, metadata, persistent identifier, data management plan, repository.
    4. Policy statements — the DMP requirement, repository and persistent-identifier expectations, metadata standards, data licensing, and minimum retention period.
    5. Data availability statements — a requirement that publications state how and where the underlying data can be accessed.
    6. Roles and responsibilities — what is expected of researchers, the research office, the library, IT, and departmental leadership.
    7. Exceptions and embargoes — the process for restricting access on ethical, legal, or commercial grounds.
    8. Review and implementation — the cycle on which the policy itself is revisited against evolving funder mandates.
    Section What it should specify
    Data deposit Named or criteria-based approved repositories, with a preference for those issuing DOIs via DataCite
    Persistent identifiers ORCID for researchers; DOIs for datasets
    Contributor recognition Use of Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) statements so data curation and stewardship work is credited
    Retention A specific minimum period (commonly ten years post-publication) rather than an open-ended commitment
    Sensitive data A named route to ethics and data protection review before any exception is granted

    Note that CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and institutional policies that reference it should cite NISO, not CASRAI, as the current maintaining body.

    Frequently asked questions and next steps

    Is a data sharing agreement legally required?

    A data sharing agreement is not universally mandated by statute in the UK, but it is required in practice whenever personal or confidential data is transferred between organisations under UK GDPR, and it is frequently a condition set by funders or ethics committees. An institutional data sharing policy is separate and is typically a funder or institutional requirement rather than a legal one.

    What is the data sharing law in the UK?

    UK data sharing is governed primarily by the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, which set the rules for handling personal data, alongside the common law of confidentiality. Research data policies must operate within this framework whenever datasets contain identifiable or sensitive personal information, in addition to meeting funder FAIR requirements.

    What are the six key data sharing principles?

    Widely cited data sharing principles hold that shared information should be necessary, proportionate, relevant, accurate, timely, and secure. Institutional research data policies should apply the same discipline alongside FAIR — findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable — so that openness and data protection obligations are handled together rather than in conflict.

    Once a first draft exists, research offices should route it through the same stakeholders named in the policy itself — library, IT, ethics, and legal — before it goes to institutional governance for sign-off, and set a firm review date rather than leaving the document to lapse.

    As funders continue tightening data mandates, from NIH’s 2023 policy to Horizon Europe’s FAIR requirements, institutions without a current, clearly scoped policy will increasingly find researchers improvising compliance at the point of grant application — precisely the risk a written data sharing policy is designed to remove. Research offices that keep the policy distinct from the data sharing agreement, and review it on a fixed cycle, are best placed to keep pace with the next round of funder requirements.

  • Small Research Grants vs Large: Funding Tiers

    Small research grants and large research grants are not separate funding systems — they sit on one UKRI governance spectrum, and award size is what determines review depth, application structure and post-award reporting burden. A small grant such as the British Academy/Leverhulme scheme (up to £10,000, single-stage) can be assessed in weeks; a NERC large grant (£1.12 million to £3.45 million, two-stage outline-then-full) can take a year to award and five years to report against.

    A small research grant is a fixed-ceiling, typically single-stage award — commonly £5,000 to £20,000 — for a discrete, short piece of work. A large grant is a multi-year, competitively tiered award of £1 million or more that funds a full research programme through a staged review process.

    What Counts as a Small Grant vs a Large Grant?

    UKRI research councils do not use one shared threshold for “small” and “large” — each council sets its own ceiling, and some (EPSRC) avoid fixed tiers altogether. NERC operates three explicit tiers under its Discovery Science route: Pushing the Frontiers, Large Grants and Urgency funding. EPSRC, by contrast, runs a single scalable Standard Research Grant with no fixed upper or lower limit, plus targeted smaller-scale mechanisms such as the New Horizons pilot. The British Academy, working with the Leverhulme Trust, funds a dedicated small-grants scheme capped well below research-council large-grant thresholds.

    Scheme Funding limit Timing Typical duration
    NERC Urgency funding Up to £100,000 (100% FEC; 80% NERC-funded) Always open; two-stage, fast-track Up to 12 months
    BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Up to £10,000 (direct costs only, not FEC) Fixed annual round deadline 1–24 months
    EPSRC New Horizons Up to £200,000 Anonymised, two-stage pilot call Project-dependent
    NERC Pushing the Frontiers Up to £950,000 (100% FEC; 80% NERC-funded) Always open; no submission deadline Typically 3–4 years
    EPSRC Standard Research Grant No fixed ceiling Open call, no deadline Project-dependent
    NERC Large Grants £1.12m–£3.45m (100% FEC; 80% NERC-funded) Two-stage: outline (typically March), full by invitation (typically November) Up to 5 years

    A widely repeated but inaccurate assumption is that every UKRI council mirrors NERC’s named small/large split. It does not: EPSRC’s model deliberately avoids a labelled “small grants” scheme, using one scalable Standard Research Grant assessed by the same peer-review process regardless of size. Anyone searching for “EPSRC small grants” is really looking for New Horizons or a modestly scoped Standard Research Grant submission, not a distinct low-tier programme.

    How Do Application and Review Processes Differ?

    The core distinction is single-stage versus two-stage review, and it tracks award size closely across every council studied here. Small and mid-tier schemes generally use one submission, assessed directly by a review college or panel; large-grant schemes add a competitive outline stage before a full proposal is even invited.

    • Single-stage: BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants (Flexi-Grant submission, assessed by the Academy’s peer review college) and NERC Pushing the Frontiers (expert review with a moderating panel) both go straight from submission to decision.
    • Two-stage: NERC Large Grants require an outline application assessed by a panel; only invited applicants then submit a full proposal for expert review and moderation. NERC Urgency funding is nominally two-stage too, but the outline exists purely to confirm eligibility quickly, with a target six-week turnaround from full application to decision.
    • EPSRC New Horizons uses an anonymised two-stage process specifically to reduce reviewer bias on smaller, higher-risk proposals — a governance choice distinct from NERC’s competitive-filtering rationale for its own two-stage large-grant process.

    For applicants, this means the administrative lead time scales with award size far more than with subject area. A £10,000 British Academy grant and a £950,000 NERC Pushing the Frontiers award both clear in one review cycle; a £3 million NERC Large Grant does not clear a panel until it has survived outline competition first.

    What Reporting and Governance Burden Applies After Award?

    Post-award governance splits along the same research-council/charitable-trust line as the application process. UKRI research councils — NERC and EPSRC included — route grant holders through the Researchfish platform for standardised annual reporting on outputs, outcomes and impact, continuing for at least five years after the grant ends. The British Academy, which is not a UKRI council, instead requires its own end-of-award report submitted directly to the Academy rather than through Researchfish.

    Full economic costing (FEC) is the other structural divide. NERC and EPSRC research-council grants are costed at 100% FEC, with the council paying 80% and the host institution covering the remainder — a standard UKRI convention that applies uniformly across small and large research-council tiers alike. The BA/Leverhulme scheme sits outside FEC entirely: its £10,000 ceiling covers direct research expenses only, with no institutional overhead contribution and no allowance for replacement teaching or computing equipment.

    Common Questions About Small and Large UKRI Grants

    What is considered a large grant?

    Under NERC, a large grant specifically means an award of £1.12 million to £3.45 million at 100% full economic cost, assessed through a two-stage outline-then-full process and tenable for up to five years. Other UKRI councils apply different, uncapped, or scheme-specific thresholds rather than sharing one fixed definition.

    What are the different types of UKRI funding?

    UKRI funding spans applicant-led responsive-mode grants (like NERC Discovery Science or EPSRC Standard Research Grants), targeted strategic or highlight calls tied to specific priorities, fellowships for individual researchers, and doctoral training and infrastructure funding. Award size and review structure vary by route, not by a single UKRI-wide small/large rule.

    What is NERC funding?

    NERC is one of UKRI’s seven research councils, funding environmental science through applicant-led routes including Pushing the Frontiers, Large Grants and Urgency funding, alongside strategic programmes. All applicant-led NERC awards are costed at 100% full economic cost, with NERC funding 80% of that total.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    For research administration teams, the practical planning question is not “which scheme pays more” but “which governance track the proposal must clear.” A discrete, well-scoped pilot study fits the single-stage BA/Leverhulme or NERC Pushing the Frontiers route; a multi-institution, multi-year programme should be budgeted and staffed for NERC’s outline-then-full large-grant cycle from the outset, including the reviewer-moderation delay built into that second stage.

    Institutions that misjudge this distinction typically lose time in one of two ways: submitting a large, complex case for support to a single-stage small-grant scheme that cannot accommodate it, or under-resourcing the sustained Researchfish and FEC reporting obligations that follow a successful large-grant award for years after the project itself ends. Mapping proposal scope to the correct tier before submission — rather than after an outline is rejected — remains the single highest-leverage step research administration teams can take across NERC, EPSRC and BA/Leverhulme funding routes alike.

  • UKRI Funded Projects Database: A Grant Office Guide

    The UKRI funded projects database — published as Gateway to Research (GtR) — is UKRI’s open-data catalogue of more than 170,000 publicly funded research and innovation awards, searchable by funder, organisation and researcher back to January 2006. Grant offices can query it directly, export it, or pull it via two REST APIs to benchmark their own award portfolio, track what competitor institutions are winning, and run first-pass due-diligence checks on prospective partners.

    Gateway to Research is UKRI’s public register of research and innovation awards, built from administrative data held in UKRI’s central Databank and refreshed quarterly under an Open Government Licence.

    What is the UKRI funded projects database?

    Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) is UKRI’s public portal onto the awards administered by its seven research councils, Innovate UK, and a set of cross-council funds. According to UKRI’s own guide to the platform, updated April 2026, GtR publishes research and innovation data on 170,000 funded projects by UKRI where the start date is on or after 1 January 2006. Studentship information is separately available from 1 February 2015.

    The underlying data is sourced from UKRI’s Innovation Funding Service, the UKRI Funding Service, the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, off-system project records, and an annual outcomes collection run through a service provided by Elsevier. UKRI publishes this data quarterly, in the second week of January, April, July and October, and makes it available through a search interface, CSV downloads, and two REST APIs. The whole dataset sits under an Open Government Licence, so grant offices can reuse and republish it without a data-sharing agreement.

    One structural gap matters for benchmarking work: Research England’s funding is not published in GtR, because most of it is allocated as a formula-based block grant rather than through individual competitive awards. Analysts comparing “UKRI funding” across institutions need to source Research England figures separately from its own Data Portal.

    How to use GtR for portfolio benchmarking

    Benchmarking with GtR means comparing your institution’s award count, funded value, and council mix against a self-selected peer group over time. The Overview data for each project — title, abstract, duration, funded value, category and status — gives the raw material; the Organisations tab lets you filter by lead or collaborating institution.

    • Pull all awards where your institution (and named peers) is the lead research organisation, grouped by funder and start year, to chart relative growth or contraction in council income.
    • Break totals down by grant category — research grant, fellowship, training grant, studentship, third-party grant, intramural — since councils apply these inconsistently, and mixing them undetected distorts trend lines.
    • Use the People tab, which publishes ORCID iDs where available, to identify which principal investigators drive a peer institution’s growth in a given scheme.

    Treat “funded value” as a commitment figure, not cash received — the single most common benchmarking error analysts make with GtR exports, covered in full under data caveats below.

    How to track competitor institutions in GtR

    Competitor tracking is the same query pattern as benchmarking, run continuously against a fixed watchlist rather than as a one-off snapshot. Set up a standing GtR API pull — or a saved search re-run each quarterly update — against your named competitor institutions.

    This surfaces what a research office actually needs: which schemes a rival is winning that you are not, which external organisations appear repeatedly as their collaborating partners, and which researchers are entering new fields, visible via shifts in project abstracts and outcome types such as spin-outs, IP disclosures and policy-influence entries. Because GtR refreshes on a fixed quarterly cycle, building the pull around the January, April, July and October windows keeps intelligence current without daily polling.

    What GtR can — and cannot — tell you for due diligence

    GtR is a legitimate, free first-pass source for verifying a prospective partner’s funding track record before a formal due-diligence process begins. It can confirm whether an organisation has previously held UKRI awards, what scale of funding it has managed, which UKRI-funded collaborators it has worked with, and whether disclosed outcomes (publications, spin-outs, IP) match what the partner has claimed.

    It cannot replace a full due-diligence check. GtR does not publish security-sensitive review outcomes, does not flag active investigations, and — per UKRI’s own publication rules — excludes any project flagged “Do Not Publish” or awaiting a funder assignment. UKRI requires offices entering international collaborations to run their own structured due-diligence process; bodies such as the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) publish separate questionnaires for that purpose. GtR data should feed into that process as one evidence source, not replace it.

    Data caveats every grant office must check before citing GtR figures

    UKRI’s own guide to Gateway to Research — last reviewed in October 2022 and updated again in April 2026 — documents several data-quality limits that most secondary coverage of GtR omits. Any office using GtR figures in a board paper, funding bid, or competitor briefing should check these before publishing a number.

    Caveat What it means for your analysis
    3.6% of projects excluded UKRI confirms 3.6% of projects are withheld from GtR as “Do Not Publish” or pending funder identification — totals will always undercount true award volume slightly.
    No unique organisation IDs UKRI does not hold a single identifier across its constituent systems, so the same institution can appear under multiple name variants — counts of organisations are “likely to be overestimated.”
    Funded value ≠ actual spend “Funded value” reflects the commitment made when a project was approved, drawn down over time — not cash disbursed. Innovate UK figures further split “project cost” from the smaller “grant offer” actually paid.
    Region reflects admin HQ, not research site Organisation region is based on the lead applicant’s postcode, which overrepresents administrative hubs (London, Oxford, Cambridge) relative to where research is actually conducted.
    Classifications inconsistent across funders UKRI’s own guide warns that classification fields are applied inconsistently between councils and should be avoided for cross-funder trend analysis.

    The April 2026 refresh also reclassified a batch of awards previously attributed to the wrong funder: projects delivered through UKRI-managed programmes — including the Advanced Propulsion Centre, the Aerospace Technology Institute and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles — were moved from Innovate UK’s totals to their correct designated funder. Any benchmarking series built before this update should be re-pulled rather than trusted as a like-for-like comparison.

    Answer-first Q&A: UKRI funding data

    What are the 7 research councils?

    UKRI’s seven research councils are AHRC (arts and humanities), BBSRC (biotechnology and biological sciences), EPSRC (engineering and physical sciences), ESRC (economic and social research), MRC (medical research), NERC (environment) and STFC (science and technology facilities). GtR’s Funder field lets you filter awards by any of these seven, plus Innovate UK and cross-council funds.

    How difficult is it to get a research grant?

    GtR does not publish success rates directly, so difficulty must be inferred: divide funded projects in a scheme by known applicant volume from the relevant council’s own reporting. Grant offices typically combine GtR’s funded-award data with council-published statistics — since success-rate data is not stored in GtR itself — for an accurate competitiveness picture.

    Did research funding get cut?

    GtR is the most reliable independent way to check funding-cut claims, since it shows actual awards made rather than budget announcements. Comparing quarterly totals for a council or scheme year-on-year in GtR — rather than relying on press coverage — lets a research office verify whether award volume genuinely fell or simply shifted between funders, as happened with the April 2026 reclassification.

    What this means for research offices

    UKRI invests roughly £8 billion of public money a year across its councils and Innovate UK, and GtR is the only complete, machine-readable public record of where that money has actually landed. Offices that build a standing, API-driven pull against GtR — refreshed each quarterly update — gain a benchmarking and competitor-tracking capability most peers still assemble manually from PDFs.

    The practical requirement is discipline about the caveats above: treat funded value as commitment, not spend; deduplicate organisation names before counting; and re-pull historical series after each quarterly refresh to catch reclassifications like April 2026’s. Applied with those checks, GtR data is a credible, citable input into a research office’s own due-diligence and strategy work, consistent with the evidence expectations shaping wider research administration practice.

  • F31 NIH Grant Administration: F32, K, DP2

    The F31 NIH grant — formally the Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Individual Predoctoral Fellowship — funds a named PhD or MD/PhD student’s dissertation research under a sponsor’s mentorship. It is one of four career-stage mechanisms, alongside the postdoctoral F32, the K-series career development awards, and the investigator-level DP2, each carrying distinct eligibility, effort and transfer rules that research offices must administer correctly.

    An F31 is defined by the National Institutes of Health as an individual fellowship that provides up to five years of stipend, tuition and training-related support directly to a predoctoral trainee named on the award — not to the sponsoring institution. That distinction, individual named award versus institutional block grant, drives most of the administrative complexity across the F31, F32, K and DP2 portfolio.

    This guide is written for research administration offices and sponsored-programs staff who process, endorse and monitor these awards — not for applicants drafting a Specific Aims page. It focuses on the governance layer: eligibility, sponsor certification and what happens administratively when a trainee moves.

    Table of contents

    What is the F31 NIH grant, and who administers it?

    The F31 is issued under two parent announcements: the standard F31 (PA-23-272), open to any eligible predoctoral applicant, and the F31-Diversity award (PA-23-271), for students from groups underrepresented in biomedical research. Both are administered by the individual NIH Institute or Center (IC) matching the applicant’s research area — NCI for cancer, NINDS for neuroscience, NICHD for developmental biology.

    Applications are accepted three times a year, with standard due dates of 8 April, 8 August and 8 December. The gap between submission and an earliest start is roughly 10–12 months — a detail offices should factor into bridge-funding and payroll continuity planning.

    The award is issued to the named fellow, with the institution acting as grantee administering funds on the fellow’s behalf — a structure to distinguish clearly from the T32, described below.

    How do F31, F32, K and DP2 differ in eligibility and purpose?

    All four mechanisms fund people rather than projects in isolation, but they target different career stages and carry different institutional obligations. Research offices administering more than one of these concurrently need a single reference point for eligibility, duration and effort.

    Mechanism Career stage Support type Typical duration Effort commitment
    F31 Predoctoral (PhD/MD-PhD student) Individual fellowship Up to 5 years Full-time dissertation research training
    F32 Postdoctoral, within early years of the doctorate Individual fellowship Up to 3 years Full-time supervised research training
    K award (mentored series) Postdoc or junior faculty, not yet independently funded Career development award Typically 3–5 years Minimum 9 person-months (75% full-time professional effort) for most mentored K awards
    DP2 Early-stage investigator (independent PI role) Research project grant 5 years Substantial PI-level commitment; no preliminary-data requirement

    The K-series is a family, not one award. Mentored variants — K01, K08 and K23 among them — require a named mentor and a structured career development plan, functioning like an F32 with a heavier protected-time obligation. The K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award is a special two-phase case: a mentored K99 phase (up to two years) followed by an independent R00 phase (up to three years), restricted to applicants with no more than four years of postdoctoral experience at application — a hard eligibility gate offices must check before endorsement.

    DP2, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, sits inside the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research programme alongside the Pioneer (DP1) and Early Independence (DP5) awards. It is restricted to Early Stage Investigators — generally within ten years of a terminal degree or clinical residency, with no substantial NIH independent-research history — and does not require preliminary data, shifting institutional review toward verifying ESI status.

    It is worth distinguishing all four from the T32 training grant NIH mechanism and R25 research education awards, which offices often confuse with these. A T32 is an institutional award: NIH funds the institution, which selects and appoints trainees, creating recurring obligations an individual F31 or F32 does not carry. An R25 funds curriculum or structured training programmes rather than a named individual’s stipend.

    Every F31, F32 and mentored K application requires a named primary sponsor with an active, fundable research programme and a documented track record of training fellows. Co-sponsors are permitted where they bring complementary expertise, and the sponsor’s statement — mentoring history, prior trainees’ outcomes, training environment — carries real weight in review; a generic, templated sponsor letter is treated as a risk signal.

    Institutional obligations research offices must certify include:

    • Domestic, accredited institution status for the awardee’s programme
    • A mentoring plan matched to the mechanism’s career stage
    • Citizenship or permanent-residency verification for F31 and F32 fellows — international trainees on F-1, J-1 or H-1B visas are not eligible for these NRSA fellowships
    • Effort certification consistent with the mechanism, including the 75% minimum for most mentored K awards
    • Just-in-time and progress-report submission on the awarding IC’s schedule

    For DP2, the check shifts to confirming Early Stage Investigator classification in the applicant’s NIH eRA Commons profile and verifying an independent PI-eligible appointment.

    How does transferability work when a trainee changes institutions?

    F31 and F32 awards are tied to the institution named at award, not fully portable in the way an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is. A fellow who moves institutions requires a new Change of Sponsoring Institution request processed through the awarding IC, with a new sponsor statement and certification — offices should treat this as a distinct administrative action, not a routine transfer.

    Mentored K awards raise a further question: because the award is built around a specific mentor-mentee relationship, a change of primary mentor or institution generally requires prior IC approval and a revised career development plan, not merely a notice.

    Are F31 grants being cancelled? This is a live compliance issue, not a hypothetical. Published analysis in a 2026 PubMed Central article documented that in 2025 the NIH terminated a cohort of Kirschstein NRSA predoctoral fellowship awards, spanning both general F31 and F31-Diversity mechanisms, disrupting funding continuity mid-fellowship. Offices should build a termination-risk monitoring step into standard award administration rather than assume multi-year NRSA fellowships are immune to mid-cycle non-continuation.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is a NIH F31 grant?

    The F31 is the Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Individual Predoctoral Fellowship, an NIH mechanism that funds a named PhD or MD/PhD student’s dissertation research in the biomedical, behavioural or clinical sciences under a sponsor’s mentorship for up to five years.

    What is the NIH F31 allowance?

    F31 support covers a stipend, tuition and fees up to 60% of the requested amount or a fixed annual cap, and an institutional allowance for health insurance, research supplies and conference travel; exact figures are set annually on NIH’s published NRSA stipend schedule.

    Who is eligible for the F31 grant?

    Eligible applicants must be U.S. citizens, non-citizen nationals or permanent residents enrolled in a research doctoral programme at a domestic institution, typically at or approaching the dissertation research stage, with a committed sponsor holding an active research programme.

    Are F31 grants being cancelled?

    Yes — 2025 saw documented terminations of active F31 and F31-Diversity awards, according to peer-reviewed analysis published in PubMed Central, making mid-cycle non-continuation a real administrative risk institutions must now track for NRSA predoctoral cohorts, not a purely theoretical scenario.

    What does this mean for research offices?

    A single office frequently administers all four mechanisms at once — a first-year PhD candidate on an F31, a new postdoc on an F32, a junior faculty member on a mentored K, and a recently independent investigator holding a DP2. Treating these as one undifferentiated “trainee grants” category is the most common governance error: each carries its own citizenship rule, effort floor, sponsor bar and transfer procedure.

    Given the documented 2025 F31 termination pattern, offices should extend standard award-monitoring practice down to the individual fellowship level, maintaining a career-stage matrix that flags citizenship status, effort deadlines, sponsor changes and Early Stage Investigator clocks across F31, F32, K and DP2 holders in one view — the governance layer that catches a transfer, termination or compliance issue early. This tracking is a natural extension of the broader standards work covered in CASRAI’s research administration resources.