Why are academic organisations assigned a funder keyword

[N. Veenstra]

We're cleaning up our organisations in Pure using the ROR database; we noticed that quite a lot of universities and UMC's have the funder type assigned. In most cases this even shows as the first type when importing, so I had to build in logic to give priority to other terms over funder when processing the array. Is there a reason why this type is assigned? It is now hard to distinguish between academic organisations and actual funders. 

For instance our own medical center:  https://ror.org/03cv38k47

[Arthur Smith]

The Crossref funder registry is being replaced by ROR; if an organization was in the funder registry then it would have this "funder" type added. You can just ignore the "funder" type completely I think unless it's the only type listed.

   Arthur

On 6/22/26 8:00 AM, N. Veenstra wrote:

We're cleaning up our organisations in Pure using the ROR database; we noticed that quite a lot of universities and UMC's have the funder type assigned. In most cases this even shows as the first type when importing, so I had to build in logic to give priority to other terms over funder when processing the array. Is there a reason why this type is assigned? It is now hard to distinguish between academic organisations and actual funders. 

For instance our own medical center:  https://ror.org/03cv38k47

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[Adam Buttrick]

Hello,

Arthur is correct that we tag all entries with the type 'funder' if they have Funder ID mappings and then also for the many new funders who come in directly through our curation pipeline. This is necessary to facilitate the transition to using ROR as the primary funder identifier, as many publishers and services have expressed the need for a more scoped view of our data referencing this type.

That said, many organizations not traditionally thought of as funders are explicitly cited as such. For example, here is one example (of many) where UMCG is being asserted as the funder of a work:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2024.105518

"This project was funded by the University Medical Center Groningen under project number: PPP-2019_023. MK receives funding support from an MD-PhD grant from the University Medical Center Groningen"

I would also caution against disregarding the use of funder when it accompanies another type. In some cases, organizations genuinely hold dual roles and removing the funder type could degrade the ability to surface and identify legitimate funding relationships for various works.

Best,

Adam

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Adam Buttrick

Product Manager, ROR

ad...@ror.org | https://ror.org | @ResearchOrgs

[Kyle Demes]

When ROR decided to add 'funder' as an organizational type, it broke many of our use cases and we ended up doing the same as you, disregarding that metadata entirely. We otherwise try to be in perfect sync with ROR about institutional data but that move conflated organizational verbs (i.e. what organizations do in the research ecosystem) with organizational adjectives (things that describe their organization). I definitely agree with Adam that universities should be thought of as funders when they are giving research grants and I definitely support using ROR as the entity list for funder resolution and will be moving in that direction soon too, but I do think the addition of 'funder' to the organizational type in ROR caused more problems than it had solved and I hope you'll consider revisiting that soon!

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[Adam Buttrick]

Thanks for this feedback! Based on this discussion, I've created a roadmap issue to address, including what I think are the outstanding questions and tensions:

https://github.com/ror-community/ror-roadmap/issues/376

Of course, please feel free to expand on these points, highlight any gaps, or propose solutions that resolve for your use case!

[Schwarzman, Alexander]

Hi Adam,

Thank you for creating the roadmap issue — the framing captures the tensions well.

I want to flag that for us, the funder type is a load-bearing dependency, and any change that removes or renames it without a direct replacement would be a breaking change in two places:

1. Submission system typeahead. Our funding-disclosure widget queries the ROR API, filtered by type = funder, to present users with matching funder names (preferred and alternative) and resolve their selection to a ROR ID. The funder type is currently the mechanism that scopes that query to funding organizations.
2. Schematron QC pipeline. We maintain static lookups derived from the ROR data dump, keyed by funder type. These are used at multiple points in the paper life cycle to validate funding metadata in the XML. Removing or renaming the type field would require rebuilding those lookups.

To your roadmap question about modeling funder as a type versus a distinct role or attribute: either approach could work for us, provided the scoped view remains queryable — both via the API and in the data dump — in a structurally equivalent way. What we need is a reliable, stable filter that identifies "this organization is used as a funder in the scholarly record," regardless of the underlying data model.

I'd also second the concern about dual-role organizations: we need the funder signal to be preserved for institutions like universities that genuinely appear as funders, not suppressed in favor of their primary type.

Happy to provide more detail on our implementation if useful.

Thank you,

--Sasha

 

Alexander ('Sasha') Schwarzman

Content Technology Architect

tel: +1.202.416.1979

aschw...@optica.org

 

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