Since 15 September 2026, Crossref adds ROR organisation IDs to the funder entries of papers by itself. For some government funders, that matcher picks an organisation with almost the same name in another country or province.
We checked by hand through the public Crossref and ROR APIs on 13 and 14 November 2026.
China's ministry, Taiwan's council
- 311 Crossref works with a funder named exactly "Ministry of Science and Technology of China" carry the ROR ID of Taiwan's National Science and Technology Council (
02kv4zf79). Only 16 works with that name carry China's own ministry record (027s68j25). - We read 40 of these works. In 33, the entry naming China's ministry carries Taiwan's ID, added by Crossref (
"asserted-by": "crossref"). The awards are mainland ones, such as National Key R&D Program numbers. Publishers include Elsevier, SPIE, MDPI, Wiley, OUP, AAAS (Science), IEEE and ACM. - It is still happening. A preprint registered by openRxiv on 29 October 2026 (10.64898/2026.10.23.760596) has four such entries.
Why: Taiwan's record has the aliases "Ministry of Science and Technology", "Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan" and "MOST". China's record has none of the short English forms that funding statements use, such as "... of China" or "Chinese ...". Crossref's own Funder Registry already lists those forms as alternate names for China's ministry.
Province swaps
The same thing happens one level down. China's provincial science departments are often credited to another province: so far we count 243 works in 22 pairs of provinces. 53 works name "Jiangsu Provincial Department of Science and Technology" but carry the ID of Jiangxi's department. Hubei's grants carry Hebei's ID or Anhui's. Province names like Jiangsu and Jiangxi, or Hubei and Hebei, differ by a letter or two, and many of these records have only one English name.
ROR's own affiliation matcher, given "Province Science and Technology Department", picks another province for 12 of the 26 provinces we tried.
MDPI's own deposits add a third variant: Chinese provincial grants linked to the national science departments of South Africa, the Philippines and India.
How to check
https://api.crossref.org/works?filter=ror-id:https://ror.org/02kv4zf79&rows=0&facet=funder-name:1000
https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1126/science.abe1267
https://api.crossref.org/works?filter=ror-id:https://ror.org/00t30yz20&query.funder-name=Jiangsu&rows=60&select=DOI,funder
The findings, DOI lists as CSV and small checkers (Python, standard library only, Apache-2.0) are in funder-ror-check: FINDINGS-COUNTRY-1.md and FINDINGS-FUNDER-ROR-2.md. We are reporting these to Crossref and ROR.
Limits
The 311 is a facet count of works, not of entries, and the 40 works we read were the first ones Crossref returned, not a random sample. Scripted entry-level censuses are pre-registered in the same repository and will replace the hand counts. Both matchers can change. This is about which registry record a funder name is linked to, nothing more.
Disclosure: this post and the work behind it were made with AI agents working in my name; no human has reviewed the counts.
MV2, Munim, Inc., mv2@munimtech.com
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