Many research funding agencies now request that researchers who receive a grant acknowledge the source of their funding when publishing their results. This information is passed by the publisher to CrossRef, from where the funding agencies can view their data. This should increase transparency and help the funding agencies see what publications result from their grants. If the public sector is funding the research, it enables the taxpayer to see where the money is going.
The Geological Society is keen to encourage our authors to provide an acknowledgement of their funding when they submit an article to one of our book series or to our journals. With this in mind, Top Tips has some advice on what funding information to provide.
On submission
When you first submit your article using our online submission system we need you to supply:
- the funding agency’s name(s)
- award or grant number(s)
- grant recipient
There is a box for each of these items as you proceed with your submission.
As you type in the funding agency name a drop-down menu will pop-up automatically and this lists the funding agency names as they appear in the CrossRef database. You should select the funding agency name from here, even if you are attempting to type the name in full.
It is important that you insert the funding agency name and not the project name, e.g. ‘National Research Foundation’ not ‘NRF Scarce Skills Scholarship’. Be careful to enter the correct funding agency’s name in the native language and note that larger granting agencies (such as the NIH) have sub-categories.
If you do not choose a funding agency name from the drop-down list and use the freeform option instead, the information will be captured in our system, but it means that the agency’s name is not in the CrossRef system. We will query you on this at proof correction stage.
If you have more than one source of funding, include them all. If your article is multi-authored, all co-authors should provide the relevant grant information to the corresponding author.
Within the submitted article text document
Our book and journal articles carry a section entitled ‘Funding’. This follows the ‘Acknowledgements’ section and appears just above the Reference list. Here are examples of Funding sections:
‘This project was funded in part by a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) project to JA [AN2345-1], and by a USPC-IDEX research chair to PDC. We are grateful to FAPESP for grant #2008/12345-7 to JA and to the European Research Council for IEF Marie Curie Grant 633355 to PDC. JA also received financial support from the University of Grantchester.’
or
‘This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council [grant number xxx].’
Please note that the contents of this Funding section are not transferred to CrossRef so it is important that you supply us with complete data at submission or via the funding table at the proof correction stage (see further down).
No funding
Of course, it’s perfectly possible that you will have conducted your work and written your article with no funding at all or no specific project grant, just the general resources available to your institution. Or you may be retired but continuing to write without funding. In these cases, include the following sentence in your submitted text, in the section headed ‘Funding’:
‘This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.’
and, when you are asked for the funding information during the submission process, simply click on the box ‘Funding Information is not available'.
At proof stage
When you receive the proofs of your article from us, there will be a funding table on the cover sheet that accompanies the proof PDF. Here, we will show you the funding information we have retrieved from the submission system and will ask you to fill in any blanks.
After publication
When we publish your article, the data that you have provided appear in two separate places.
(1) If you have included the funding agency ID (a hyperlink to the funder), the data are reported to the Funder Registry, a project facilitated by CrossRef (https://www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/). This database holds details of more than 18 000 funding bodies and is updated monthly so it is still expanding. Funders are able to search this database and match published articles with their grants so that they can see the results of their investments. If, however, you have supplied funding information that doesn’t include a recognized ID, it won’t be sent to the Funder Registry.
(2) All the funding information you have supplied will appear in the Info & Metrics tab of your paper online.
Best wishes
The Production Team