Elsevier Participates in Project to Make R&D Investments More Transparent

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