Funding Entity (CRIS)

Funding entity

In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a specific award or funding instance — its funder, award number, amount, currency, start and end dates, and the project and people it supports — distinct from the abstract Funder organisation and from the project itself.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 22 Aug 2026

Funder, funding, and project: three different things

The distinction matters because a single funder can make many awards, a single award can support one or more projects, and a project can, less commonly, draw on more than one award. In CERIF this is modelled through the cfFund/cfFunding linking structure; commercial CRIS platforms use their own equivalent terms — Pure calls it an Award, Elements calls it a Grant — but all three separate ‘who gave the money’ from ‘this specific instance of giving it’ from ‘what the money is funding’.

Linking a funding entity to external identifiers

Linking the Funding entity’s Funder field to a Crossref Funder Registry ID, increasingly consolidated into ROR, and linking the entity to a project identifier such as a RAiD or a local project ID, is what gives funder reporting and cross-institution research-output attribution its joinable structure — without those links, matching ‘this output’ to ‘the grant that paid for it’ depends on free-text acknowledgement parsing.

How this differs from its closest CRIS siblings

A Funding entity is not the Funder organisation itself — the Funder is one of the entities a funding entity points to, not the funding entity — and it is a different linking-entity class from Affiliation (CRIS). Affiliation links a Person to an Organization Unit; a funding entity links a Funder, a Project, and People, and the two can change independently of one another — a researcher can move institutions mid-grant without the funding entity itself changing.

Frequently asked questions

Is the funder organisation itself a funding entity?

No — the funder (e.g. NSF, the ERC, Wellcome Trust) is a distinct entity that a funding entity references; the funding entity is the specific award instance.

Can one funding entity support multiple projects?

Yes, depending on the platform’s modelling — a single award can be linked to more than one project entity where a funder makes one grant covering multiple distinct work packages.

References

euroCRIS, ‘CERIF Funding model’ (eurocris.org/cerif).

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Funding entity"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/funding-entity" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/funding-entity",
  "name": "Funding entity",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/funding-entity",
  "description": "In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a specific award or funding instance — its funder, award number, amount, currency, start and end dates, and the project and people it supports — distinct from the abstract Funder organisation and from the project itself.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/funding-entity",
  "sameAs": [
    "Award",
    "Grant (CRIS)"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "author": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
  },
  "datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:14:48",
  "dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:52:37",
  "inLanguage": "en-GB",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true
}

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