Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A national research council recorded against a grant by its ROR ID, so that every publication and dataset resulting from that grant can be reliably attributed to it regardless of how its name is abbreviated in any given record.
- Is an instance
A private foundation whose funding is tracked in an institutional CRIS via its Crossref Funder Registry ID, prior to that ID being consolidated into ROR.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A commercial sponsor listed only as free text in a manuscript's acknowledgements, with no persistent identifier attached, is a funder in the colloquial sense but not a research funder record in the CRIS/metadata sense this term describes.
Editorial commentary
In CRIS and research-information metadata, a research funder is a formally identified organisation, governmental, charitable, or commercial, that provides financial support for research and is recorded as such against a grant, award, or output, typically via a persistent identifier rather than a free-text name. Recording the funder precisely, rather than as an inconsistently spelled organisation name, is what allows funding to be tracked, reported, and linked reliably across systems: grant management, institutional CRIS, and publisher metadata all need to reference the same funder consistently.
The two identifier systems in current use are the Crossref Open Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR). Crossref announced in 2023 a long-term plan to consolidate the Open Funder Registry, roughly 44,000 funder identifiers, into ROR, and ROR has been importing Funder Registry data since 2022; new systems, including major DMP tools, are increasingly built around ROR IDs for funders rather than legacy Funder Registry IDs, though the older registry remains available during the transition. A research funder may also determine conditions attached to funding, including an open access mandate governing how funded outputs must be published.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Research funder"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/research-funder" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/research-funder",
"name": "Research funder",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/research-funder",
"description": "An organisation providing financial support for research activity. May be governmental, charitable or commercial. Such an organisation determines how funding is allocated for research and may have requirements for how the results of research are published, including open access (OA).",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/funding-finance#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/research-funder",
"sameAs": [],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:13:42",
"dateModified": "2026-08-17T01:54:23",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
