What's the difference between a sponsor and a funder?

DataCite Chat Room
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Hi everyone,

When the funderReference property was added to DataCite Metadata Schema 4.0, the “Funder” contributorType was also removed. But the “Sponsor” contributorType remains. This makes me think that there’s a difference between a funder, whose name would be entered in the funderReference, and a sponsor, whose name would be entered in the contributor property using the “Sponsor” contributorType. (This also make me think that it’s still appropriate to think of funders as contributors, even though their names are not recorded in the Contributor property.)

But from the definitions and usage notes in the schema docs, it’s not clear to me what the differences would be. I’ve pasted the definitions and notes here for convenience:

funderReference:

  • Definition: Information about financial support (funding) for the resource being registered
  • Note: It’s best practice to supply funding information when financial support has been received

sponsor

  • Definition: Person or organisation that issued a contract or under the auspices of which a work has been written, printed, published, developed, etc.
  • Note: Includes organisations that provide in-kind support, through donation, provision of people or a facility or instrumentation necessary for the development of the resource, etc.

I think there’s some overlap. But is it fair to say that a sponsor might be different from a funder because a sponsor has provided support that is not financial? If so, would it be helpful to mention this in the docs?

Thanks :grinning:

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This is something I’ve wondered about as well, @juliangautier! I believe your thinking here is correct, that it can be non-financial support; I believe this is what the note is getting at with “in-kind support”:

Includes organisations that provide in-kind support, through donation, provision of people or a facility or instrumentation necessary for the development of the resource, etc.

As a side note, for 5.0, we are considering whether to move away from the existing contributorTypes to something more flexible to support CRediT: see this section of the RFC for 4.5 where the Metadata WG outlined a suggested approach to this change.

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I agree that the non-financial part of the support divides funders from sponsors. As an example, we are using sponsor for field stations that host scientists and provide a wide variety of non-financial support. I expect that this could also be used in a similar way for facilities.

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Thanks Kelly and Ted. This is helpful!

About contributorTypes and CRediT, I was thinking the same thing - it’s a related conversation.

For now, I’ll keep working on helping make sure that the difference between sponsor and funder is clear to folks sharing data.