Adding funder information to bioRxiv preprints

Government funding agencies, philanthropic organizations, and academic institutions underpin the scientific enterprise by providing the funds that support research. Funders are understandably eager to track the outputs of research they fund; however, this has proven difficult historically because of lack of standardization of funder metadata, confusion as to where funding information should be added, and the occasional failure to include complete details of who funded the work in papers.

To help address this problem, the bioRxiv submission system now includes dedicated fields that submitting authors can use to provide funder information and any associated grant numbers. Introduction of this feature is timely because funding organizations have recently been incorporated into the Research Organization Registry (ROR) with dedicated ROR IDs.

How to add funder information when you submit a preprint

During submission, bioRxiv authors can select their funder(s) from the standardized list of research organizations available in a drop-down menu or add freeform text if their funder is not included in the registry.

Authors can then add individual grant numbers in a separate field. Both the funder information and the grant number(s) will be included in the metadata associated with the preprint when it is posted on bioRxiv (these are displayed in the Abstract tab) and will also be indexed by search engines and literature-discovery tools. The funding information is also available via our API.