Funding: enable both FundRef and ROR as indicators

[tosteiner]

Thanks so much for building this excellent app!

Seeing that the app seems to assume that Funding data necessitates a Funder Registry data point, it's worth noting that Crossref has been working for quite some time to enable a transition from FundRef to ROR - so the lack of FundRef data does not necessarily mean lack of funding data ...

• https://ror.readme.io/docs/funder-registry
• https://www.crossref.org/blog/open-funder-registry-to-transition-into-research-organisation-registry-ror/

Hence, it's be great if RORs could also be included as indicators of Funding data

[aadivar]

Thanks for flagging this! You're right — with the Open Funder Registry transitioning to ROR, the absence of FundRef data doesn't mean absence of funding metadata. Currently, ROR IDs are only counted under the Organizations dimension, which misses their dual role as funder identifiers.

At the Crossref API level, member coverage stats don't distinguish funder-ROR from affiliation-ROR, so there's a data limitation here. I'm planning to add a note in the methodology explaining this gap, and will look into whether the works-level API can give us better signal on this. Longer term, if Crossref exposes more granular coverage data, I'd love to reflect that properly in the scoring.

This is an open source project — contributions to improve the funding logic are very welcome!

[amandafrench]

ROR Technical Community Manager here! In case it's useful, I wanted to mention as well that while unfortunately the Crossref API doesn't distinguish between ROR for affiliations and ROR for funders, there is a GitLab repo that spits out daily member metrics from Crossref internal data, and that distinction is visible in that data. See https://gitlab.com/crossref/labs/member-metrics-tables/-/artifacts -- I periodically download the .zip and consult the statistics.csv file to get the numbers for the charts at https://ror.org/impact.

[aadivar]

This is really helpful, thank you Amanda. There's no established playbook for distinguishing affiliation-ROR from funder-ROR at the member level, so this was a bit of a lifeline while I've been banging my head against it.

I pulled the per-member CSV and cross-referenced the funders and ror_ids columns — having these separate gave me a starting point. Following the thread further, the charts on ror.org/about/impact are powered by a Google Sheet with useful Crossref API filter combinations (row 26), and the aggregate stats (rows 52–54) break ROR into three roles: affiliations, institutions, and funders. The funder-ROR cohort is still small (181 members, row 85) but it'll grow as the transition progresses.

I'm planning to use the GitLab CSV as a supplementary data source and track the funder-ROR transition as it develops. Everything is open source — scoring logic is in packages/core/src/scoring/weights.ts. Fork it, critique it, send PRs.