Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A funder registers each award it makes as a Crossref grant DOI record as part of its own reporting infrastructure; when a grantee later publishes a paper and the funder or grantee supplies that grant DOI in the paper's Crossref metadata, the resulting record carries a structured, resolvable link back to the specific award rather than just the funder's name in an acknowledgments paragraph.
- Is an instance
A university research office reconciling award data against publication output uses grant DOI-linked Crossref records to automatically match papers to the grants that funded them, instead of manually parsing acknowledgment text across hundreds of publications.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A funder's own internal award ID or grant number — for example, an NIH grant number or an internal project code — is not itself a grant DOI unless that specific award has actually been registered with Crossref's Grant Linking System and assigned a resolvable DOI. Many funders' internal identifiers remain unregistered and have no corresponding grant DOI.
Editorial commentary
A grant DOI is a Digital Object Identifier minted for an individual research grant or award record, through Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS), launched in 2019. Unlike a conventional DOI, which resolves to a journal article or dataset landing page, a grant DOI resolves to a metadata record describing the award itself — funder, award title, award/grant number, relevant dates, and, where supplied, participants.
How it links funded outputs back to the award
When a funder or grantee includes a grant_doi attribute in the Crossref metadata submitted for a research output, Crossref automatically inserts an isFinancedBy relationship connecting that output to the grant record. This makes the funding-to-output relationship structured and machine-traceable across the scholarly record, rather than relying solely on a free-text acknowledgment sentence that software has to parse and guess at.
Why funders adopt it
A funder that registers its awards as grant DOIs gains a structured way to answer “what did this specific award actually produce” — every publication, dataset, or other output that cites the grant DOI (or has it supplied on its behalf) becomes automatically linked back to that award record, feeding funder reporting and impact-tracking workflows without manual reconciliation.
How it fits the wider Crossref ecosystem
Grant DOIs are part of the same infrastructure documented in Crossref’s Research Nexus, which links articles, preprints, grants, datasets, and protocols together via structured metadata relationships, and rely on the same underlying DOI system explained in how the DOI Registration Agency model works. Tooling such as DMPTool’s ROR and Funder Registry integration increasingly draws on the same funder-identification infrastructure that makes clean grant-DOI linking possible in the first place.
Related terms
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-term="Grant DOI"
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"description": "A grant DOI is a Digital Object Identifier minted for an individual research grant or award record — rather than for a publication, dataset, or person — through Crossref's Grant Linking System (GLS), launched in 2019. Where a conventional DOI resolves to a journal article or dataset landing page, a grant DOI resolves to a metadata record describing the award itself: funder, award title, award/grant number, dates, and, where supplied, participants. When a funder or grantee includes a grant_doi attribute in Crossref metadata for a research output, Crossref automatically inserts an isFinancedBy relationship linking that output back to the grant record, making the funding-to-output relationship machine-traceable across the scholarly record rather than relying on a free-text funding-acknowledgment sentence alone.",
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"datePublished": "2026-08-22T09:45:55",
"dateModified": "2026-09-04T07:25:40",
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