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Why Award DOIs Matter: Strengthening Discovery Across UC’s Funding Programs

Adam Buttrick,

Posted in: Persistent Identifiers

Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 1, 1915. A painting depicting a white swan and a black swan mirrored over a horizontal line, meeting beak-to-beak to symbolize duality and the union of opposites.

The Research Grants Program Office (RGPO) at the University of California Office of the President manages one of the UC system’s most impactful research portfolios, comprising over $100 million in yearly awards across programs such as the California Breast Cancer Research Program and the California HIV/AIDS Program. These diverse and impactful funding activities are complemented by rigorous internal data practices for tracking their impact, including providing rich and detailed descriptions of these activities in their public-facing grants database. 

As persistent identifier (PID) enthusiasts, the availability of this high-quality data source immediately presented itself to the UC3 team as a unique opportunity. By leveraging the RGPO’s comprehensive metadata to generate award DOIs in DataCite, we could bridge the gap between their accounting and the larger research ecosystem, broadcasting the full scope of RGPO’s impact to this even larger audience.

Why DOIs?

Registering DOIs for awards provides a high-level view of all of the RGPOs’ work across its funding programs, describing them in a unified fashion using the DataCite schema, which provides a persistent, machine-readable reference and improves the visibility of these funding activities. By assigning DOIs, RGPO awards become connected to the broader persistent identifier ecosystem, meaning that other systems can easily discover, link to, and reuse information about these awards and their associated research outputs. Ultimately, this helps close gaps between internal and external systems, creating a more comprehensive picture of the University of California’s impact and RGPO’s role in that success. 

How we did it

We worked closely with the DataCite team to analyze existing practices for representing awards in their schema, ensuring that everything was modeled correctly. This included identifying and resolving inconsistencies in representations.

Once those issues were resolved and the model was set, the registration process itself was straightforward:

  1. We mapped RGPO award data to the DataCite schema.
  2. Added ROR IDs for the funder (University of California Office of the President) and other relevant entities.
  3. Linked research outputs to the awards by including DOIs for their related works.
  4. Generated the XML for the award records and registered via the DataCite API.
  5. Finally, we provided the RGPO with a report of these registrations so that the DOIs could be integrated back into the RGPO’s grants database.

What’s Next: Automation and Research Graph Connections

We’re now focused on two primary next steps: 

1. We’re working to automate more of the DOI registration and update processes to ensure new or changed awards are registered more frequently than the current manual updates.

2. We’re collaborating with OpenAlex on their new grant-funded project to incorporate better and more complete funding metadata into OpenAlex’s scholarly graph. As one of the first registrants of award DOIs with DataCite, OpenAlex is using CDL’s detailed account of the RGPO’s funding activities to model the ingestion and mapping of DataCite award DOIs more broadly. 

Our efforts open RGPO grant projects to further enrichment of metadata and connections. This work includes matching grant-funded research outputs with their corresponding award DOIs, both by matching unstructured publication references in the funder metadata and by mining full-text publications to identify links that were not explicitly asserted in their DOI metadata. The goal is that once these connections are identified, they can also be incorporated back into the award DOIs and DataCite, thereby making their description more comprehensive and complete.  

Our hope is that this work demonstrates the value of PIDs for awards and encourages other funders to adopt a similar approach. Registering award DOIs doesn’t just improve local data quality; it strengthens global research infrastructure and helps make the impact of publicly funded research more visible and more connected.