Clarify the scope of project and funding entity

[abollini]

Project and funding are currently overlapping concepts in the openaire information space. In OpenAIRE project really mean "funded project" that lead to an always present funding.

It can be useful to look to the ORCID data model to see how they prefer the use of funding over project https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006894674

This ambiguity in my opinion has lead to a sub optimal definition and representation of the project and funding entities in the current openaire guidelines for CRIS managers. In the funding entity we miss a way to directly related the funding with the Organisation(s) or People that get the funds. It is always implicitly assumed that a fund is related to a project but this could be not the case for personal funding or prize that are equally important in the Research systems. Moreover, this lead typically in an unnecessary complex representation of what the researchers see as a single piece of information the "funded project".

If you look to our current example https://github.com/openaire/guidelines-cris-managers/blob/master/samples/openaire_cerif_xml_example_projects.xml

all the data that we use to describe the project are indeed referred to the funding. The consortium definition explicitly says "...who are contractually bound..." The start / end date are obviously mentioned in the funding The identifier are indeed related to the funding / the contract

The project entity becomes useful only when there is no funding (or the organisation running the CRIS / RIMS doesn't see value in making this internal funding explicit) or multiple ones. But, again in the current version, due to the fact that the consortium is recorded on the project side it is difficult if not impossible to really use a single project entity to map multiple fundings.

My proposal is to relax the project description making it more general, more close to a generic "Research related activity" to be used as an umbrella to aggregate fundings (both approved than rejected), research outputs, etc.

[jdvorak001]

May need replicating some of the elements from Project also in Funding, such as the Consortium.

[jdvorak001]

To be carried out in the master template, then it gets propagated here.

[jdvorak001]

We agreed to give the guideline to recommend using Funding for expressing the list of funded projects. Use Project as umbrellas for different fundings or in similar situations, see the first comment of this issue.