AMSTERDAM, November 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --
FundRef aims to
standardize reporting of funding sources of research
Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and
medical information products and services, today highlights its
participation in FundRef, a collaborative pilot project between
scholarly publishers and funding agencies, facilitated by CrossRef.
The aim of the project is to develop a standard mechanism for
gathering and disseminating information about funding sources of
published scholarly research.
Currently governments and other research funders do not have an
easy or standard way to track publications that result from their
funding. As they are increasingly required to report on the
outcomes of the research they have supported, this becomes a
problem. At the same time, standard bibliographic data for
scholarly publications do not always include funding source
information, which means mining publication data to track funding
sources is difficult. FundRef aims to provide a solution for both
problems.
Elsevier's participation in the pilot is marked by its provision
of a funding body registry that provides a standardized taxonomy of
4,000 international funding agencies, including unique IDs for
each. The registry is based on Elsevier's existing SciVal Funding
content that includes a comprehensive database of funding
opportunities from Australia,
Canada, the European Commission,
India, Ireland, New
Zealand, Singapore,
South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States. The funding body list is
freely available at http://info.scival.com/funding and as
linked data via our APIs at http://data.elsevier.com.
"It is critical for governments and research funders to be
accountable for reporting the research and development outcomes
they support, which is currently almost impossible to connect,"
said Ed Pentz, Executive Director at
CrossRef. "This initiative provides funders and scholarly
publishers with a unique opportunity to collaborate on a standard
that will make R&D investments more transparent."
"Elsevier is pleased to provide the master list of 4,000 funding
agencies to this initiative and anyone else interested to utilize
it," said Chris Shillum, Vice
President, Product Management, Platform & Content at Elsevier
and CrossRef Board member. "We are excited about the potential
outcomes of this collaboration and will continue to support the
FundRef initiative in expanding transparency of research funding
information."
At the end of the pilot, with the workflow for submission and
dissemination fully tested, Elsevier intends to incorporate funding
identifiers into its publication submission process. This will
provide the funding agencies with the ability to match their
identifiers with CrossRef DOIs of published papers and clearly
track their investments and demonstrate to the public the impact
and benefits they are contributing to society.
Other organizations collaborating with FundRef as part of the
initiative include: American Institute of Physics (AIP), the United
States Department of Energy (DOE), American Psychological
Association (APA), United States National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), National Science Foundation, IEEE, Wellcome
Trust, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford
University Press, and Wiley.
About CrossRef
CrossRef creates services for the scholarly community that
require technical and business collaboration among organizations
that cannot be done more efficiently by a single entity. The
deposit and query infrastructure, as well as the business
agreements in place, already provide a way for a large number of
publisher members to share metadata to accomplish reference
linking, Cited-by linking, plagiarism screening, and version
tracking. FundRef meets these criteria, and can be provided with a
minimum of new overhead and investment. More information can be
found at: http://www.crossref.org/fundref/index.html.
About the Elsevier SciVal Suite
Elsevier's SciVal suite of services supports academic and
government leadership in evaluating, establishing and executing
research strategies that optimize the performance of existing
assets and maximize investments to enhance near and long-term
productivity. SciVal tools leverage Scopus data, Elsevier's trusted
source of bibliometric data, to offer innovative yet authoritative
solutions. Current suite offerings include: SciVal Spotlight, a
strategic tool that generates unique institutional and country maps
of existing and emerging research strengths based on an
interdisciplinary perspective of current performance; SciVal
Funding, an online solution that provides targeted recommendations
on grants to pursue based on pre-populated research profiles and
historical awards; SciVal Strata, a web-based research performance
tool that offers users the flexibility to construct relevant
contextual data to evaluate research teams or individual
researchers, using a range of indicators based on Scopus data;
SciVal Experts, a semantic technology-based application that
enables researchers to identify and locate sources of expertise at
an individual or departmental level within and across institutions.
More information can be found at: http://info.scival.com/
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and
medical information products and services. The company works in
partnership with the global science and health communities to
publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and
Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major
reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online
solutions include ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and
Mosby's Nursing Suite, which enhance the productivity of science
and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint
Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver
better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people
worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a
world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly
owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols
are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and
ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
Media contact
Iris Kisjes
Elsevier
+31-20-485-3072
i.kisjes@elsevier.com
SOURCE Elsevier