Researchfish is closing on 31 July 2027. For the more than 90 funders that relied on it, including UKRI, NIHR, and many of the UK’s largest research charities, the question of how to track what their funding produced is suddenly urgent. When UKRI last went to tender, it concluded there was no viable alternative product (Johnson 2026). We think that was the wrong question. The alternative to Researchfish is not another product. It is open infrastructure that is already carrying this data at scale, plus a policy decision about where researchers assert the link between their grants and their outputs.
In this post we (Melissa Harrison, Europe PMC and Kyle Demes, OpenAlex) want to show what already exists, what our two organisations are connecting next, and what funders can do today.
Two different jobs, only one of which belongs in the open
Progress reporting bundles together two very different kinds of information, only one of which belongs in the open, so it is important to be precise about which one we are talking about. Narrative reporting, such as progress against objectives, team composition, and unpublished or sensitive results, belongs in funders’ own systems, and nothing in this post suggests moving it.
Output reporting is different. Which publications, preprints, datasets, software, and clinical trials resulted from which award is factual information that already lives in the scholarly record. Yet for years, researchers have been asked to retype it annually into a proprietary platform, where it was locked away from the very community that produced it. That is the part of Researchfish’s job that open infrastructure can take over, and the part this post is about.
This is not hypothetical. It is running today.
The infrastructure exists
Europe PMC and OpenAlex play distinct but complementary roles, and the pipeline between them is already operating at scale.
Europe PMC is a world-leading open biomedical literature resource that combines a discovery platform with a full-text repository. Through its submission system, Europe PMC plus, researchers funded by 35 Europe PMC funders already link their publications directly to the grants that supported them, at the moment they deposit. Those grant–publication links live in Europe PMC’s open database connected to other core resources like the life science datasets underpinning these publications.
OpenAlex is the open scholarly graph: hundreds of millions of works connected to authors, institutions, sources, and funders, all openly licensed with open APIs. OpenAlex now holds over 16 million award records from roughly 30,000 funders worldwide, drawn from funders’ own open databases (Gateway to Research, NIH ExPORTER, Wellcome’s open grants data, and dozens more) and from assertions in the scholarly record. More than half of those awards are already linked to at least one research output, and those outputs are not just journal articles: they include hundreds of thousands of datasets, preprints, reports and dissertations, as well as software and more.
This is the part that makes this a report on progress rather than a proposal: Europe PMC is already one of the largest sources of grant–output linkages in OpenAlex, with millions of researcher- and funder-connected assertions flowing from Europe PMC into the open graph. A researcher who links a paper to a grant at deposit in Europe PMC is already contributing to an open, reusable record of what that funding produced.
Publisher-supplied funding metadata (the kind that flows through Crossref and DataCite) has incredible value, however, researchers have no easy way to correct or extend it after publication and the process relies on publishers delivering this metadata when registering DOIs. Europe PMC and OpenAlex are the places in the open ecosystem where researchers themselves can assert and confirm grant-output links. That researcher-confirmed layer is precisely the human-curated data Researchfish was built to collect. It already exists in the open, it just needs to become the default place this reporting happens.
Open means many front doors
A proprietary platform gives every funder the same front door and a single supplier. Open infrastructure works differently, and this flexibility is its core advantage. A funder deciding what to do before July 2027 has several routes, all available now:
Use Europe PMC as the reporting platform. For existing Europe PMC funders, grant linking at deposit is in production today. Point grantees to a workflow they already use for open access compliance, and the linkages accumulate continuously in the open instead of arriving in an annual burst. For other life sciences funders, becoming a Funder of Europe PMC is the closest thing to a like-for-like replacement for the outputs portion of Researchfish, and it exists now.
Work with OpenAlex directly. Funders across all disciplines can have their awards represented in OpenAlex and build reporting and analysis straight on the open graph, covering output types and fields well beyond biomedicine. Many funders are already doing this.
Integrate open infrastructure into systems you already run. A funder can keep its grants management system or portal and pull candidate outputs from open APIs, asking researchers only to confirm a funder or grant ID rather than to type it. One funder OpenAlex works with already compares open grant-output linkages against its own compliance records and automatically reminds exactly the researchers whose assertions are missing or their requirement. Reporting becomes exception handling instead of data entry.
Both Europe PMC and OpenAlex provide open APIs and openly licensed data, so research information system vendors and other open infrastructures can build on the same foundation. With a proprietary platform, you choose a supplier. With open infrastructure, you choose a workflow and you can change your mind later without losing the data, because the data was never trapped inside a platform.
What OpenAlex and Europe PMC are working on together
The foundations exist; our collaboration is about tightening the loop between them. The directions we are exploring include making the flow of researcher assertions from Europe PMC into OpenAlex fully systematic and timely, so a link confirmed at deposit is visible to funders on OpenAlex within days; presenting researchers with candidate linkages from text mining and the open graph to confirm rather than enter from scratch; and capturing links to datasets, software, and other outputs at the same natural moment in the Europe PMC workflow. We will share more as this work develops, and we would rather shape it with the community than announce it finished.
What funders can do now
Two decisions, both available today, would do more than any new platform:
Publish your award list openly. Even a minimal feed of award IDs and titles, without personal data, gives researchers something to select instead of retype, lets open infrastructure link outputs to your grants, and means your reporting data accrues in the open from day one. Funders like Wellcome and UKRI (through Gateway to Research) already show this is routine.
Require funding metadata at the point of deposit, and accept researchers’ assertions in open infrastructures as reporting. When linking the funder and grant is part of the process of depositing the output, the information is captured once, at the natural moment, and can be reused everywhere. The annual reporting burst simply stops being necessary.
Join the conversation
Researchfish’s closure sets a deadline, but it is also the first real opening in a decade to move output reporting onto infrastructure the community owns. If you are a funder weighing your options, an institution with reporting requirements, or an open infrastructure interested in connecting, we would love to hear from you:
Melissa Harrison mharrison@ebi.ac.uk
Kyle Demes kyle@openalex.org