ORFG Issues Community Call to Improve Research Output Tracking

The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) engages a range of actors to develop principles and policies that encourage sharing of papers, data, and other research outputs. It is in this spirit of engagement and broad collaboration that today we publish an open letter to the community – a call to action for interested parties across the research ecosystem to engage, convene, and collaborate in service of better research output tracking.

Proliferation in research outputs and the growing diversity of dissemination channels is both a challenge and an opportunity. What is being produced throughout the lifetime of a grant? Where are these products shared? How are they being reused by citizens, researchers, and policy makers? Answering these questions could help funders better measure the impact of their grant dollars and research sharing policies, as well as help the larger academic community by making research outputs more discoverable and reusable.

Last year, the ORFG launched a working group dedicated to policy compliance and research output tracking. Through regular conversations, this group has honed in on specific roadblocks in the research output tracking workflow, and identified concrete actions that could be taken by key interested parties in the ecosystem to improve these processes.

We propose some of these actions in our open letter, organized into four priority areas: (1) funder acknowledgments, (2) persistent identifiers, (3) resource availability statements, and (4) machine readable metadata. Our proposed actions focus first on what we can do as funders to improve research output tracking, and then the complementary steps that could be taken by other actors in this space, including grants management systems, publishers, persistent identifier providers, and content repositories, among others. Our full letter can be found here. 

We recognize that the community may have many other ideas on how to improve research output tracking, and we are eager to open communication channels. To this end, we have set up a Google form for anyone to provide input. Please read our full letter, fill out our form, or reach out to us directly at the ORFG (erin@orfg.org).