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For Funders

EXPLORE for Funders

Know what your
funding produced.

Every grant you award should be traceable to what it produced, papers, datasets, software, patents, and to whether that output meets your open access requirements. Manually chasing that information across thousands of grantees and repositories does not scale.

Connect your grant database to the OpenAIRE Graph once, and every output linked to your funding is captured automatically, continuously, for as long as it keeps appearing in the graph. This page covers how to connect, what you get back, and who is already doing this.

Index your funder database

Connecting your funder database means submitting your grant metadata, project titles, IDs, grant periods, principal investigators and funded institutions, so OpenAIRE can match it against research outputs across 160,000+ indexed sources.
  • Export your grant metadata
    Provide a structured export of your awarded grants, via APIs or standard formats (CSV, JSON, XML). At minimum this should include grant ID, title, PIs, institutions and award period.
  • OpenAIRE validates and ingests your data

    Your grant records are checked for completeness and matched against the existing graph. Any ambiguities, duplicate grant IDs, missing PIs, are flagged for review. They are alsi harmomised using standards to be exported to repositories and used by researchers when depositing.

  • Grants appear in Explore, linking begins
    Your grants get their own project pages. From this point on, every output OpenAIRE finds that references one of your grant IDs is linked automatically, continuously, without further action from you. 

No cost, no infrastructure required.

Indexing your funder database is free and does not require you to run any technical infrastructure, you provide the data once and OpenAIRE handles matching and updates going forward.

Contact us to get started

How grants get linked

Once your grant database is indexed, OpenAIRE uses several methods, working together, to connect your grants to the outputs they funded. Understanding these helps explain why coverage improves over time rather than being complete on day one.
  • Explicit grant ID in metadata
    The strongest signal, when a depositor or repository or publisher includes your grant ID directly in structured metadata, the link is immediate and precise.
  • Acknowledgement text mining
    When a grant number appears in the acknowledgements section of a full-text PDF but not in structured metadata, OpenAIRE's text-mining pipeline detects it and proposes the link.
  • Researcher self-claiming
    Researchers can manually link their own outputs to your grants via the Link & Claim service, useful for older outputs that predate automated matching.
  • Institutional and CRIS reporting
    Institutions using OpenAIRE Monitor or a connected CRIS system often report grant-output relationships directly as part of their own institutional reporting.

Coverage grows over time. A newly connected funder typically sees the majority of recent, well-documented outputs link within the first update cycle, older or less-documented outputs continue to be picked up as text mining and researcher claiming catch up.

Funders already in the Graph

The OpenAIRE Graph already includes grant metadata from major European and international funders. If you are considering connecting your own database, seeing who else has done it, and how their portfolios are represented, is a useful starting point.

See full list

Open Science mandate monitoring

Once your grants are connected, OpenAIRE monitors open access compliance automatically. Every new output linked to your grants is checked against your mandate requirements, no manual chasing, no spreadsheets.
  • Per-grant compliance status
    See at a glance which grants are fully compliant and which have outstanding outputs still awaiting an open access version.
  • Grantee-level reporting
    Identify which institutions or PI groups consistently meet, or miss, your OA requirements across your portfolio.
  • Trend analysis over time
    Track how OA compliance rates have changed year on year across your entire portfolio, or broken down by programme.
  • Exportable dashboards
    Download reports in CSV, JSON or PDF for internal reporting, board presentations, or audit purposes.

Want a dedicated portfolio dashboard? OpenAIRE Monitor gives your team an ongoing view of your entire portfolio, with a long list of indicators from connected researche outputs, citation analyis, open science. collaboration metrics, and much more, updated automatically as new outputs are indexed.

Contac us to give you a demo

Impact and SDGs

Beyond compliance, connected grant data lets you answer a bigger question: what did this funding actually contribute to? Every output in the graph is automatically classified by Field of Science and mapped to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
  • Field of Science breakdown
    See exactly which disciplines your funding is producing output in, including multidisciplinary work that spans several fields at once.
  • SDG contribution mapping
    Understand how your portfolio contributes to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, useful for reporting to boards, governments or the public.
  • All available via API
    Every impact metric shown in the dashboards is also available through the OpenAIRE API, for embedding in your own internal reporting tools.