2026-10-28 –, LUMC02
Research funders are under growing pressure to demonstrate the impact and reach of their portfolios, but doing so requires being able to connect grants to outputs reliably and at scale. Persistent identifiers are the connective tissue that makes this possible: Grant IDs, ORCIDs, RORs, and output IDs allow funders to link funded projects to who does the work, at which institution, and what it produces. In this workshop, representatives from ZonMw and NWO share their practical experiences implementing PID strategies, including what was difficult, what worked as expected, and what surprised them. This is followed by an OpenAlex demonstration that provides context on how open reporting systems use PIDs (or work around their absence) to create funder-level insights. The session is grounded in real implementation and invites participants to reflect on the funder's role in the broader PID ecosystem.
For research funders, the question is not just whether PIDs matter in the abstract — it is whether their grant data is structured well enough to be found, linked, and used. This workshop addresses that challenge directly, from the perspective of funders who are actively working through it.
The session brings together two Dutch research funders (ZonMw and NWO) who have both developed PID strategies and begun implementing them in their grant systems and application portals.
Topics include:
- how Grant IDs are being introduced into funding workflows via Crossref;
- the challenge of mapping PIDs to messy and inconsistent funder data;
- -strategies to make funder APIs genuinely interoperable with external systems;
- Strategies for avoiding large-scale modification of infrastructure while still implementing PIDs.
A demonstration from OpenAlex will contextualize this work within the broader reporting landscape. Open research information services, such as OpenAlex, can surface connections between funders and research outputs using PIDs as a source of ground truth. They can also make inferences where PIDs are absent, using metadata scraped from available acknowledgement sections and publisher records. This raises an interesting question for funders who are considering whether to develop a PID strategy: PIDs are not always a prerequisite for outputs to appear in systems like OpenAlex, but they dramatically improve the reliability, persistence and completeness of what gets surfaced. Understanding this distinction helps funders make the case for PID adoption internally, and helps them set realistic expectations for what they will gain.
The session is structured around short practitioner contributions followed by facilitated discussion. Participants are invited to share their own contexts and challenges. The aim is not to present a finished model, but to compare notes across different stages of the PID journey and identify what works and what does not.
Hans de Jonge (1975) is director of Open Science NL, the national initiative for Open Science, part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). He is co-chairing the funding metadata working group of the Barcelona Declaration and CoARA Board member.