With the Walden launch behind us, 2026 promises to be an exciting year for OpenAlex. And thanks to a transformative grant from Wellcome of $3.6M over three years, funding metadata will be a major focus of that development.
This Wellcome-funded project aims to make funding information a first-class part of the open scholarly graph so that funders, institutions, researchers, and tool-builders can rely on open, structured, reusable funding metadata.
Below is a progress update on what we’ve shipped so far, what we’re working on now, and how funders can help shape what comes next.
Why funding metadata (and why now)
Funding data is essential infrastructure for research strategy and accountability: funders need to understand what they supported, what it produced, and what changed as a result. They also need global data to position their work within the global funding landscape.
But today, most funding intelligence workflows still depend on closed databases or on burdensome reporting from grantees into siloed funder databases. OpenAlex already provides a comprehensive, open inventory of research outputs. This project extends that foundation so funding metadata becomes similarly open, structured, and connected.
What’s new in OpenAlex
We are hosting a webinar February 19, 2026 at 10am EST to review updates in more detail and allow time for interactive Q&A. You can register for that webinar here and a recording will be available on our YouTube channel afterwards. Here’s a quick update on recent progress.
1) We’re mining full text to match funders to outputs
We’ve begun matching funder names to research outputs through full-text data mining, adding millions of new linkages between funders and their outputs.
We have just started this work and have 10s of millions of PDFs to continue working through, but the momentum is building quickly.
2) “Awards” are now first-class objects in the OpenAlex graph
We’ve updated the OpenAlex schema so awards are first-class citizens, with their own entity type and API endpoint: https://api.openalex.org/awards
This is foundational work: it lets us represent grants/awards as structured nodes in the graph (instead of only as scattered fragments attached to works), which is required for reliable linking, curation, and downstream funding intelligence.
3) When DOIs are registered for grants, they appear in OpenAlex
Any funder registering DOIs for grants can now have their award metadata show up in OpenAlex almost immediately after registration. We’ve built this integration for Crossref award DOIs and will soon have completed the integration for DataCite award DOIs as well.
4) We’re ingesting grant metadata directly from funders
We’ve started ingesting funding metadata directly from funders who make their grant data available online but don’t mint DOIs. At the time of posting this, we had already ingested 11.5M grants.
This is critical: To build a comprehensive database of funding metadata, we need to meet funders where they’re at and ingest their data directly in the formats they’ve made available.
What we’re working on next
Here’s what we’re working on during 2026:
- Full-text matching (finish running across our corpus of fulltext; set up on-going pipeline for new PDFs)
- Improving matching quality (funder name disambiguation)
- Grant ID matching (create linkages between individual grant IDs and papers)
- Scaling ingest across many funders and formats (from well-structured national databases to the long tail of smaller or distributed sources)
- We’re starting with a seed list of 50 funders to develop these pipelines. You can check out that list and monitor our progress here.
- We’ll scale funder ingest later this year, but if you want to suggest specific funders you don’t see on our roadmap yet, e-mail kyle@openalex.org
- Expanding linkages beyond acknowledgements by incorporating trusted reporting sources wherever possible (e.g., funder impact reports)
- Clarifying and prioritizing use cases so we build the funding intelligence workflows funders actually need
- Pilot apps that suggest linkages between grants and outputs (e.g., based on vector distance of text in grants and outputs)
Funder workshop in London: April 27–28, 2026
We’re convening an in-person workshop with collaborating funders on April 27–28, 2026 in London, England.
The goals are to:
- Review what we’ve learned so far (what’s working, what’s messy, what needs partner input)
- Confirm and refine funder use cases for open funding intelligence and impact reporting
- Jointly shape the next phase of the project—both technical priorities and outreach activities to scale this initiative globally in the following two years
We will publish a report summarizing the workshop and detailing next phases of the project.
Call to action: we’re looking for funder collaborators (all shapes and sizes)
If you’re a funder—large or small, national or regional, public or private, anywhere in the world—we’d love to talk.
With each funder collaborator, we’re looking to:
- Assess the current state of their grant metadata (coverage, structure, identifiers, openness, and constraints)
- Help make their award records (and impact reports) easier to discover and reuse when possible
- Ingest their grant metadata into OpenAlex to improve linkages between awards and outputs
- Fully understand the funding intelligence use cases that matter most to them, so the open dataset supports real reporting and strategy needs
How to get started
The simplest next step is an introductory meeting.
Email the project lead and OpenAlex COO, Kyle Demes: kyle@openalex.org
Thanks (and more soon)
—Kyle